Mechanical stress in silicon oxides grown on hydrogen implanted Si

Abstract

The work presents results on stress characterization of 10 nm silicon oxides thermally grown on Si hydrogenated at different conditions, namely RF plasma at different substrate temperatures and hydrogen plasma immersion implantation (PIII) at energy 2 keV and different fluences. From electroreflectance technique (ER) and spectral ellipsometry (SE) spectra the characteristic energy bands of direct electron transitions in Si are elaborated. The stress in dependence of hydrogenation conditions is considered and related to the shifts of the direct energy gaps. The stress values are evaluated from the Raman shifts around 520 cm-1 gained by micro-Raman spectroscopy (RS). The correlated data from the ER, SE and RS allow hydrogenation conditions using shallow implantation of H+ ions to be defined at which low strain and defect density level can be grown (© 2012 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)