Objective
The TOPS project aims to establish an excimer lamp assisted photochemical vapour deposition (photo-CVD) process for the fabrication of ultrathin tantalum pentoxide dielectric films on silicon for 0.13 µm ULSI silicon, and will also explore the extension of this process to other novel dielectrics. Photo-CVD will explore the use of high energy ultraviolet photons as an alternative energy source to current high temperature rapid thermal processing. The proposed process route is highly novel and has the potential to lead to significant breakthroughs in ULSI processing.
The project will be structured in two phases. Phase 1 will demonstrate the concept of a basic excimer lamp assisted photo-CVD process for the deposition of tantalum pentoxide gate dielectric films. The criterion for success of this phase will be the deposition by photo-CVD of a tantalum pentoxide dielectric on silicon and the preliminary physical and electrical performance characterisation of the dielectric layer thus grown.
Phase 2 will address optimisation of the photo-CVD process window on 100 mm wafers in terms of fabrication parameters and substrate surface termination following surface cleaning.
Future ULSI CMOS technologies (e.g. critical dimension 0.13 µm) will require gate dielectrics with equivalent silicon dioxide thicknesses in the range 35-50Å, appropriate electrical characteristics and high reliability. One of the most critical challenges for deep submicron silicon research is the technological limit to the use of silicon dioxide as a gate dielectric. For 0.13 µm ULSI CMOS, the projected gate dielectric thicknesses for silicon dioxide become so thin that direct tunnelling effects and excessively high electric fields become serious obstacles to reliability. What is required is a thicker layer of a higher dielectric constant material that will have the same or similar effective capacitance when it is put into a device. Significant effort in novel dielectric deposition research is focussed on tantalum pentoxide (Ta2O5).
Future ULSI device architectures may also preclude the use of high temperature processing and so the development of low-temperature fabrication routes to these high dielectric constant materials is important as a long-term research goal. In order to address this issue of thermal budget, a number of new low temperature growth techniques are now under study including photo-assisted methods. Previous work in this field has focussed on the use of lasers. However, their use is inherently limited by the total photon fluxes available and they are therefore not suited for large area wafer processing. Unlike lasers, lamp sources provide the potential for large area coverage. In particular, the recent development of excimer lamps has opened up new possibilities for initiating a wide range of large area low temperature photo-induced reactions.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- engineering and technology environmental engineering energy and fuels renewable energy
- natural sciences chemical sciences inorganic chemistry transition metals
- natural sciences chemical sciences inorganic chemistry metalloids
- natural sciences physical sciences optics laser physics
- natural sciences physical sciences theoretical physics particle physics photons
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Coordinator
Cork
Ireland
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