5 nm Gate Oxide Grown by Rapid Thermal Processing for Future MOSFETs

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Formation of 5-nm-thick SiO2 film has been studied by rapid thermal processing (RTP). The SiO2/Si(100) interface of 5-nm RTP-grown SiO2 film evaluated by high-resolution TEM is quite uniform, at least ordered within one or two atomic layers. The TDDB characteristics have indicated that short-time breakdown failure diminishes with decreasing oxide thickness, drastically below 6 nm in thickness. However, leakage current at low field, which is related to oxide wear-out, is observed in ultrathin RTP-SiO2 film (<6 nm). We have applied 5-nm-thick RTP-SiO2 as a gate oxide of MOSFETs and obtained sufficient subthreshold and transconductance characteristics as device performance.