Refractory Gate Technology for Radiation Hardened Circuits

New materials are considered as candidates to replace polycrystalline silicon as the gate and interconnection material in CMOS circuits for VLSI radiation hardened applications. The fabrication and testing of MOS capacitors with tungsten field plates is described. Devices metallized with tungsten are equally as hard as devices with aluminum metallization, but it was observed that the oxide layer tended to become leaky after a specific processing step.