Stress relaxation technique for thermally grown SiO2

A corona discharge technique has been utilized at 800 °C to fully relax thermal oxides grown on Si wafers. In an experiment involving two oxidation steps, the corona-relaxed oxides are shown to be equivalent to ∼1200 °C thermally grown or thermally relaxed oxides, both with respect to index of refraction and oxygen diffusion coefficient. The activation energy for oxygen diffusion through a completely relaxed thermal oxide is found to be 0.8 eV.