Shallow-Trench Isolation With Raised-Field-Oxide Structure

Abstract

This paper describes a novel shallow-trench isolation (STI) structure to suppress the corner metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) inherent to trench isolation. A gate oxide and a thin polysilicon layer are first processed, and are then followed by the STI process. With this raised-field-oxide structure, the anomalous subthreshold conduction of the shallow-trench isolated MOSFETs due to electric-field crowding at the active edge has been successfully eliminated. No inverse-narrow-width effect is observed as the device width has been scaled down to 0.3 µm. The raised-field-oxide structure provides a larger process margin for planarization, and good device characteristics were achieved by this novel STI structure.