Enhanced thermally induced stress effect on an ultrathin gate oxide

Abstract

The effects of thermal stress on the electrical characteristics of metal–oxide–semiconductor diodes with oxides in an ultrathin regime were studied. By centering a quartz ring as a heat sink beneath the silicon wafer, the introduced temperature gradient results in a corresponding hat-like shape thickness distribution for an oxide grown on the wafer with a rapid thermal processing system. The enhanced exterior tensile and compressive thermal stresses due to introduced temperature gradient make the oxides exhibit less and more substrate injection saturation current Jsat, respectively, in comparison to control oxides. Their flatband voltage VFB data also clearly show the dependency of effective charge number density Neff on exterior thermal stress. A stress distribution model is proposed to explain the observation. Co-60 irradiation was also performed on the stressed samples to observe this stress extent by examining the variation of electrical characteristics. It was found that an oxide grown on a wafer in exterior compression exhibited better radiation hardness than one in tension.