Internal passivation for suppression of device instabilities induced by backend processes

The concept of internal passivation has been introduced as a means of suppressing device degradation due to backend processes. The proposed concept has been demonstrated by tailoring the composition of a PECVD (plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition) oxide film to achieve such an internal passivation, resulting in a process with built-in reliability. Specifically, field inversion and hot carrier degradation induced by backend processing have been suppressed. The results have been duplicated on two different commercially available PECVD systems, establishing that neither the problem nor the solution was related to a specific deposition system.<>