Phonon-Energy-Coupling Enhancement: Dramatic Improvement of the Reliability of Silicon MOS Transistors

The vibrational modes of the Si-Si and Si-O bonds exhibit enhanced energy coupling when RTP is applied to the SiO₂/Si system. When applying this effect to the MOS transistors, we observed dramatic reliability improvement of MOS devices. The breakdown voltage of the gate oxide (10-20 nm) has been improved by 40%. The hot-electron related lifetime of MOS transistors has been improved by 100 times over the deuterium-annealed transistors