Abstract
Ion bombardment or backsputtering of SiO2 films has been shown to result in severe insulator degradation in device processing. Here we have investigated the effects of low-energy neutral-particle bombardment on device quality SiO2 films and have compared degradation produced by neutral-particle bombardment with that produced by ion bombardment. These results show that (1) neutral-particle bombardment produces substantially less (by two or three orders of magnitude) fixed charge at the SiO2/Si interface than does ion bombardment; (2) the most prominent degradation produced by neutral bombardment is the creation of a large interface state density across the band gap which is not related to a nonuniform charge distribution at the interface; (3) metal-oxide-semiconductor degradation produced by neutral bombardment may be removed by annealing at temperatures ?400 °C. Comparison of oxide charge degradation produced in SiO2 by ion and neutral-particle bombardment suggests that the neutralization processes at the vacuum-SiO2 interface, which take place only in ion bombardment, have the dominant role in this degradation. As a result of these processes, in ion bombarded samples, charge carriers migrate to the SiO2/Si interface in the field across the oxide film. This mechanism is absent in the case of neutral bombardment.
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