Rapid Fabrication of 100 nm or Thinner Fully Depleted Silicon-on-Insulator Materials for Ultralow Energy Consumption

Abstract

The fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) wafer is the core material of the FD-SOI technology used for manufacturing the applications with ultralow energy consumption for internet of things, artificial intelligence, automotive, and wearable devices. Ion-cut process is the main technology to fabricate FD-SOI wafers. After ion cutting, the silicon layer transferred on the insulator includes a spongelike damaged layer. Therefore, it must contain a thinning buffer layer with a thickness more than 150 nm to remove the damaged layer by a polishing step. The requirement of the additional buffer layer makes the direct fabrication of a less than 100 nm thick SOI layer from the as-split status impossible. Here, we develop a process based on solid-phase epitaxial growth (SPEG) technique, abandoning the polishing step, and thus achieve a one-step fabrication of FD-SOI substrate. First, inducing amorphization of an SOI layer via blistering supersaturated hydrogen ions through microwaving fully consumes the poss...