Rapid Thermal Processing With Reactive Gases

Two major trends have always been consistent in silicon integrated circuit technologies: lateral and vertical scaling of the device area into the submicron regime and the increase in wafer size. The growth of high quality thin thermal silicon dielectrics on the order of 3 to 15 nm constitutes one of the major challenges associated with submicronmeter silicon ULSI. Mutually conflicting requirements the growth conditions arise from process integration. Growth times for thermal oxides in the 10 nm regime are very short at high temperatures. Consequently, oxide growth occurs under the initial phase growth kinetics, which is hard to control in furnaces and is currently not well understood. Silicon dioxide films with good electrical characteristics require high temperatures both during growth and post oxidation annealing1,2. Chlorine-based mobile ion gettering enhances the oxidation rate and requires activation temperatures on the order of 1100°C 3,4. Two step oxide growth processes have been suggested as one partial solution to the above problems5, but they seem to require excessively long high temperature steps for post-oxidation annealing and chlorine activation.

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