Microstructural analysis reveals nickel silicide agglomeration along boron-pinned grain boundaries in CMOS devices, highlighting mechanisms driving increased electrical resistance.
We performed detailed analysis of nickel silicide discontinuities induced by agglomeration, which causes the increased electric resistance in high-performance complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor devices, by using advanced physical analysis techniques: transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) analysis, and three-dimensional atom-probe (AP) analysis. We confirmed that the agglomeration of the nickel silicide is related to elongated-triangular-shaped splits, which cause discontinuities that occur at low-angle grain boundaries pinned by boron clusters even with small stress. We successfully determined the formation mechanism of these nickel silicide discontinuities in detail.
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Kudo et al. (2014) studied this question.
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