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Development of High-performance Strained-Silicon-Transistor Technology |
- 2.2-fold increase in electron mobility through improved surface planarization - | ||||||||
Tokyo
Japan, December 6, 2001 - Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT) has developed
a technology to enhance the performance of strained-silicon (Si) transistors,
which is expected to be used in the next generation CMOS (Complementary
Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor) technologies. The strained-Si transistor
is fabricated on a Si layer deposited on a substrate containing SiGe,
and utilizing the resulting lattice distortion in Si to achieve high
carrier mobility. As a result of planarizing the SiGe layer by chemical
mechanical polishing (CMP), it was possible to minimize the performance
degradation due to surface roughness, and achieved a 2.2-fold increase
in mobility compared to conventional Si-MOS transistors. This result
demonstrates the advantage of the strained-Si transistors over the Si
transistors to realize ultrahigh-speed CMOS. Until now, CMOS, a typical semiconductor device, has followed a paradigm of improving performance by decreasing dimensions and increasing the scale of integration. Beyond the so-called 100nm-generation, where following this paradigm is considered difficult, a new technology to improve performance not reliant only on downsizing, will be required. One candidate, which has recently been the center of interest, is strained silicon. It has been known that carrier mobility increases when the crystal lattice of Si is stretched. Thus if Si is placed on SiGe, which has a slightly wider lattice spacing than Si, then it is stretched (strained), and mobility is increased. A strained-Si transistor uses this strained layer as the channel layer (the layer through which electrons flow). Until now, however, although improvement in mobility has been confirmed, the breakthrough improvement in performance expected with the strained-Si transistor has not been realized. Hitachi undertook the challenge of improving the performance of the strained-Si transistor. Hitachi found that if the surface of the SiGe layer was rough, so was the surface of the strained-Si layer, and this led to a decrease in carrier mobility. Based on these findings, Hitachi developed the strained-Si technology of growing the strained-Si layer on a planarized Si-Ge layer surface to achieve full performance expected in strained-Si. Features of the technology are as follows:
Using this technology, MOS transistors with a channel length of 0.24m were fabricated. Both electron and hole mobilities were found to have increased by +120% and 42% over the conventional Si transistors, respectively. The current drive was found to have significantly improved by, +70% for the n-channel, and 51% for the p-channel, over the conventional Si-MOS devices. This result shows that the strained-Si technology is indeed a viable candidate for next-generation high-speed CMOS technology. <technical Terms>
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WRITTEN BY Corporate Communications Division |