The Effects of Mechanical Uniaxial Stress on Junction Leakage in Nanoscale CMOSFETs

This paper reports the influences of uniaxial mechanical stress on the reverse-biased source/drain to substrate junction leakage of state-of-the-art 65 nm CMOS transistors. For n-channel metal-oxide-semiconductor (NMOS) transistors, the band-to-band tunneling (BTBT) dominates the junction leakage current due to heavily doped junction and pocket implants. However, for p-channel metal-oxide-semiconductor (PMOS) transistors with embedded SiGe source/drain, the leakage current is found to result from both BTBT and generation current due to defects generated in the SiGe layer and at the SiGe/Si interface. A four-point bending technique is used to apply mechanical uniaxial stress on NMOS and PMOS devices along the longitudinal direction. It was found that the leakage current of both devices increases (decreases) with applied uniaxial compressive (tensile) stress, and that the strain sensitivity of the junction leakage of NMOS transistors is much weaker than that of PMOS transistors. By combining the bending technique with process strained Si (PSS) technology, additional stress was applied to NMOS and PMOS with high built-in stress to investigate the characteristics of junction leakage under extremely high uniaxial stress. It is shown that uniaxial tensile stress can both enhance the NMOS device performance and decrease the junction leakage. However, for the PMOS, there exists a tradeoff between boosting the transistor performance and decreasing the junction leakage current, so there is a limit in the amount of compressive stress that can be beneficially applied.