Development of thermal neutron SER-resilient high-k/metal gate technology

We report the experimental procedure and data that establishes the correlation between natural boron (B10) concentration and thermal neutron soft error rate (SER) in an advanced 28nm high-k/metal gate (HK/MG) technology node. Thermal neutron induced singe event upsets (SEU) depend on the concentration of B10 in the contact process adopted for boosting SRAM performance. However, as technology rapidly evolves in terms of transistor feature size and overall design complexity, B10 concentration needs to decrease so as to reduce thermal neutron SER risk. Optimization of contact and eSiGe process can provide a technology profile that is robust against thermal and high energy neutron SER.

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