Science Based New Silicon Technologies Exhibiting Super High Performance due to Radical-reaction-based Semiconductor Manufacturing

Abstract

Current silicon technologies are now facing very severe limitations such as no more progress on the speed performance of microprocessors from Intel at around a 3-GHz clock rate, for 5 years. Current silicon technologies can fabricate large scale integrated circuit (LSI) only on (100) surface silicon substrates by using two-dimensional planar structure metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistors because the gate insulator films are formed at present by using high temperature thermal oxidation with O2 molecules and/or H2O molecules, resulting in the fact that relatively high-integrity SiO2 films can be obtained only on (100) surface silicon substrates, but not on other crystal orientation silicon surfaces. Thus, the very limited capability of the silicon crystal can be practically utilized by current silicon technologies. In order to utilize the entire capability of the silicon crystal, we must establish science-based new silicon technologies to fabricate LSI on any crystal orientation silicon surface by using three-dimensional structure MOS transistors where very high integrity gate insulator films must be formed on any crystal orientation silicon surface with the same formation speed, i.e., radical oxidation (SiO2) and radical nitridation (Si3N4) at low temperatures. Accumulationmode balanced complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect-transistor (CMOS) LSI fabricated on (551) surface silicon substrates has been theoretically confirmed to exhibit super high speed performance above a 100-GHz clock rate at the 45-nm technology node where the gate insulator filmto-silicon interface is atomically flat and the series resistances of the source and the drain electrodes are decreased by a factor of two orders of magnitude by developing very low contact resistance new silicide materials for the n region (ErSi2) and the p + region (Pd2Si), respectively. Accumulationmode balanced CMOS LSI fabricated on (551) surface silicon substrates will establish full CMOS system LSI exhibiting super high performance. Science-based new silicon technologies continuously support the progress of worldwide information communication technologies (ICT) through this 21st Century at least.