IIRW 2006 Tutorials

 

         

 

SiON Gate Dielectric Reliability

Paul Nicollian, TI

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SiON films continue to be the choice gate dielectrics for high performance CMOS. Driven by the relentless race to achieve increasingly aggressive performance targets, the continued scaling of electrical thickness is now compounded by the slowing of voltage scaling.  This has resulted in the erosion of reliability margins to razor thin levels, requiring an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the degradation physics of these films. In this tutorial, we will discuss the advancements and issues in breakdown mechanisms and lifetime modeling that are important for enabling deeply scaled SiON films to meet challenging high performance reliability requirements.

 

Paul E. Nicollian received the B.S. degree in physics from Penn State University (1983) and the M.S. degree in physics from the University of Texas, Dallas (1990). He was employed by United Technologies Mostek Corporation in 1984. He joined Texas Instruments in 1985, where he is currently a Senior Member of the Technical Staff in the Silicon Technology Development center. His current research is focused on the reliability physics of ultrathin gate dielectrics.  He has co-authored 25 publications, holds 2 US patents, and is a recipient of the 2000 IRPS Best Paper Award. He served on the IRPS Technical Program Committee from 2000 - 2005, co-chairing the Device Dielectrics Committee in 2001 and the Process Induced Damage Committee in 2000. He also served on the 2004 – 2005 IEDM CMOS and Interconnect Reliability Committee. Mr. Nicollian is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

 

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The Negative Bias Temperature Instability in MOS Devices

Sufi Zafar, IBM

T.J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 USA

TEL: +1-914-945-3301 FAX: +1-914-945-2141 email:szafar@us.ibm.com

 

Negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) has become an increasingly important reliability issue for advanced CMOS technology.  In the present tutorial, the experimental and theoretical understanding of NBTI  will be reviewed. This tutorial will be organized as follows:  Section I will review the experimental observations which characterize NBTI.  This section will discuss the dependence of NBTI on stress conditions including measurement methdologies. The dependency of NBTI on process conditions will also be discussed.  Section II will review various models, comparing the various theories proposed for NBTI. Section III will discuss the practical implications of NBTI, including the performance degradation of circuits. Section IV will discuss the implications for new gate-stack materials.  Finally, Section V will summarize some of the many open questions.

Sufi Zafar received her Ph.D. in physics from Syracuse University in 1991. She currently works at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Her main research areas are experimental and modeling studies of the electrical properties of high permittivity metal oxide films for gate dielectric and memory applications. She has also worked on hydrogenated amorphous silicon and germanium films for solar cell applications. In addition, she has an interest in biophysics, in particular on the potential application of microelectronics to areas of life science. She has published 32 first authored and over 22 coauthored publications. She has received the Materials Research Society Graduate Student Award and an IBM Research Division Award.

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Current Challenges in Cu Electromigration Reliability

Christine Hau-Riege

AMD

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In today's integrated circuit (IC), more than a kilometer of metal interconnects are required to build a single microprocessor, so that many billions of metal segments exist in each IC. These metal segments are a significant reliability concern due mainly to electromigration. This concern increases with each new generation of microprocessor, which requires the use of a larger number of narrower interconnects, stressed at increasing current densities. This tutorial will address the basics of Cu electromigration and current routes for improved reliability.

 

Dr. Hau-Riege obtained her BS and PhD degrees from the department of Material Science and Engineering at MIT in '96 and '00,
respectively.  She worked at Intel as a BEOL reliability engineer in Portland, OR before joining AMD in Sunnyvale, CA.  At AMD, she has been part of the Technology & Reliability Development group since late-2001, focusing on electromigration issues.

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Reliability Aspects of Integrating High-K Dielectrics into Back-End-of-Line (BEOL) Process Technology

Tom Remmel, James Walls and Douglas Roberts

Technology Solutions Organization 

Freescale Semiconductor

Tempe, AZ

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The demand to provide increased integrated circuit functionality at continually decreasing prices is driving the integration of more and more components on-chip.  This on-chip migration now includes the incorporation of passive elements directly into the integrated circuit process flow; elements that were previously resident off-chip.  Common integrated passive devices include discrete components such as inductors, capacitors and resistors, but could also include resonators, filters, and even optical components.  Because of their nature, these devices are usually integrated within or on top of the multi-level metallization.  Several of these devices are fabricated using high dielectric constant (high-K) materials.  Integrating these materials on-chip presents an array of challenges, including multi-dimensional trade-offs between materials selection, unit process definition, insertion point into the process flow, electrical performance, defectivity, yield and reliability.  This paper will focus on the opportunities and trade-offs of integrating high dielectric constant materials into the back-end-of-line process.  Throughout the development process,  reliability is the key metric which drives many of the decisions. 

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New Challenges and Requirements to Reliability Research and Development in Semiconductor Technology Evolution

Yi Ma

Sr. Manager of Advanced Application Development

Front End Product division

Applied Materials

974 E. Arques Ave

Sunnyvale, California, 94086, USA

Email: yi_ma@amat.com

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Semiconductor technology has made significant progress in the past decade. Device dimension has been down scaled to sub-nanometer range. The progress is primarily driven by market force, products with higher performance and lower cost. In the mean time, the semiconductor product market has shifted to more diversified consumer products versus conventional enterprise products.  The trend added more complexity and uncertainty of technology direction, the pressure to deliver product to market on time has been heightened. As a result, numerous new materials, new process integration schemes and new design concepts have been developed and implemented to meet the technology demands. Reliability research and development has been significant part of the vicious technology progress.  In this talk, I’ll explore challenges and requirements Reliability community will face in the coming technology generations from a technology engineering point of view.  I’ll discuss how technology development cycle and cost can be reduced if impacts of material and process integration on reliability are understood at early stage of technology development. I’ll also explain why developing new methodologies and establishing new reliability standards are critical to early technology adoption by design community and market place.

 

Yi Ma is a Senior Manager of Advanced Application Development at Applied Materials.  His primary responsibility is to explore new applications in Logic and Flash memory technologies for market share expansion. He has been working on gate stack engineering, particularly in the areas of hi-k, nitrided oxide, laser anneal and poly gate grain structure engineering.  His latest passion is in the area of nano-crystal memory devices.  Prior to joining Applied Materials in 2002, Yi Ma was a member of technical staff at Technology R&D Labs of Agere Systems, formerly Bell Laboratories of Lucent Technologies, where he led the FEOL thermal process development of 350 nm and down to 90 nm CMOS technologies. Yi Ma received a Ph.D in Physics from North Carolina State University in 1993.

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Strategy of Future Reliability Qualification

Andreas Preussger

Infineon Technologies AG
P.O. Box 80949, 81609 Munich, Germany
Tel:+49 89 234 86087, email: Andreas.preussger@infineon.com

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The most efficient qualification strategy has become a major part of successful development of products and technologies. The boundary conditions for reliability have become tighter and the dependency between product design, technology and reliability performance has been increased. The discussion on this topic has now reached the community working on standards and guidelines. Qualification standards from the old age work with lists of stress tests that have to be performed to demonstrate the reliability of a product. They give fixed test times and gating criteria like “no fail out of a sample of some ten parts” to be tested mostly in a black box approach, where the failure mechanism is not known because the test ends typically before the first failure is activated.

One example of a standard describing such a procedure is the AEC-Q100, a stress test driven approach which has been created by the Automotive Electronic Council (AEC). It describes a stress test driven qualification approach. Similar standards exist from JEDEC and Telcordia. These standards were needed to improve the quality level at IC manufacturers, their suppliers and the OEMs which were in the range of percents in the late seventies.

 

Today’s products and especially new technologies following the Technology Roadmap are facing certain new challenges that are not covered by old stress test driven qualification approaches.

Complexity of technologies and products is increasing per technology node and per product generation. The products are covering more functions within one IC.
This improving can only be achieved by better performance of the technologies used to build the products. These improvements on the technology side can only be achieved by changing the materials with an increasing frequency which means that the rate of introduction of new materials to be introduced as solutions for upcoming problems will be dramatically increasing. Therefore the time for development, implementation and learning with these new materials becomes shorter and shorter.
In this context the term qualification has to be redefined.

The development from the old stress based approach to modern strategies like knowledge based qualification using robustness validation are presented in the tutorial together with some application examples how robustness of products could be measured based on technology. Application areas which do not follow these new approaches run the risk to loose contact to the state-of-art technologies.

The present example of via reliability is used to explain what methodologies could be used to find the trade off between performance, design and reliability
Many design challenges are linked to reliability. Tools offered by EDA vendors are now able to do design optimization with respect to yield and reliability as an integrated part of the standard design flow. The integration of the reliability tools is typically done in a partnership between EDA vendor and chip manufacturer. Examples will be presented.

Andreas Preussger received his diploma in physics from the Technical University Aachen in 1980 and the doctor rer. nat. degree from the same university in 1986. From 1986 he worked on the development of smart power, BICMOS and integrated sensor technologies at the laboratories of Siemens AG, Munich, Germany. He holds one of the main patents of Siemens on field of smart power. Since 1992 he is engaged in reliability physics. He raised the central reliability lab for the development of reliability methods and the qualification of all Si-technologies at Infineon and the foundries working for the company. Until 2000 he was director of the technology reliability department. He is now working on the field of quality and process management. He was or is member of the program committees of the IRW, IRPS, ESREF, ICMTS, and Infineon member of JEDEC 14, the Reliability Technology Advisory Board of Sematech and the Robustness Validation Working Goupt of ZVEI and SAE.

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Phase Change Memory Reliability

Su Jin Ahn

Technology Development Team #2

Memory Division, Semiconductor Business
Samsung Electronics Co., LTD.

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Phase Change Memory (PRAM) is considered to be one of the viable candidates for the next generation to solve the problems and intrinsic scaling limits of conventional nonvolatile memory. Recently, there have been great advances in PRAM development including new phase change materials, various device structures, process technology innovations, and device designs. This tutorial will introduce operation principles of PRAM exploiting new memory material called chalcogenide and then report the reliability considerations to become commercial products. The reliability issues are disturbance immunity, cycling endurance, data retention and degradation related to back-end process. The experiments have been performed by using 256Mb-density device and the observed degradation modes and underlying physical mechanism have been discussed.

 

Su Jin Ahn received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electronics and electrical engineering from Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang, Korea in 1996 and 1999, respectively. In 1999 she joined Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Yongin, Kyungki-do, Korea. Since then she was engaged in the research and development of CMOS process and device technologies in DRAM process integration. She took part in 4Giga-bit DRAM development and involved in the mass production of 512M DRAM. From 2002 she joined in new memory development, such as MRAM, PRAM, STTM. She is currently working on 256Mb PRAM development.

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Reliability of On-The-Shelf Stored Image Sensors

prof.dr.ir. Albert J.P. Theuwissen

Dalsa

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An aging effect in solid-state image sensors is studied: the generation of hard errors resulting in hot spots or white pixels.  These effects manifest themselves as an increase in dark current, a loss in transfer efficiency (in the case of CCDs) and in extra "hot spots".  The effects even occur in sensors that are stored on the shelf.  It is well known in the imaging community that image sensors are subject to a degradation effect due to radiation.  For instance devices intended for space application are fabricated in special processes so that the sensors can withstand radiation or to make them radiation-hard.  The question is whether similar effects are also responsible for the creation of hot pixels during normal on-the-shelf storage of image sensors.  Simply storing imaging devices on the shelf does indeed result in a few extra hot spots in the picture taken at a later time. It is important to point out that these hot spots or leaky pixels are permanent.  They are not a soft error, in the sense that a high-energy particle is absorbed in the silicon, generates a cloud of charge carriers and after the next image all effects are gone. The effects investigated in this study are hard errors: once they are created, they remain present in the imagers. This tutorial describes experiments that are conducted to prove that the main origin can be found with neutrons that are part of terrestrial cosmic rays.

 

Albert J.P. Theuwissen received the degree in electrical engineering from the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) in 1977.  His thesis work was based on the development of supporting hardware around a linear CCD image sensor. From 1977 to 1983, his work at the ESAT-laboratory of the Catholic University of Leuven focused on semiconductor technology for linear CCD image sensors.  He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 1983.  His dissertation was on the implementation of transparent conductive layers as gate material in the CCD technology. In 1983, he joined the Micro-Circuits Division of the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven (the Netherlands), as a member of the scientific staff.  Since that time he was involved in research in the field of solid-state image sensing, which resulted in the project leadership of respectively SDTV- and HDTV-imagers.  In 1991 he became Department Head of the division Imaging Devices, including CCD as well as CMOS solid-state imaging activities. He is author or coauthor of many technical papers in the solid-state imaging field and issued several patents. In 1988, 1989, 1995 and 1996 he was a member of the International Electron Devices Meeting paper selection committee.  He was co-editor of the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices special issues on Solid-State Image Sensors, May 1991, October 1997 and January 2003, and of IEEE Micro special issue on Digital Imaging, Nov./Dec. 1998. He acted as general chairman of the IEEE International Workshop on Charge-Coupled Devices and Advanced Image Sensors in 1997 and in 2003.  He is member of the Steering Committee of the aforementioned workshop and founder of the Walter Kosonocky Award, which highlights the best paper in the field of solid-state image sensors. During several years he was a member of the technical committee of the European Solid-State Device Research Conference.  Since 2003 he participates in the technical committee of the European Solid-State Circuits Conference. Since 1999 he is a member of the technical committee of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference.  For the same conference he acted as secretary, vice-chair and chair in the European ISSCC Committee and he is a member of the overall ISSCC Executive Committee. In 1995, he authored a textbook "Solid-State Imaging with Charge-Coupled Devices".  In 1998 he became an IEEE distinguished lecturer. In March 2001, he became part-time professor at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.  At this University he teaches courses in solid-state imaging and coaches PhD students in their research on CMOS image sensors. In April 2002, he joined DALSA Corp. to act as the company's Chief Technology Officer.  In September 2004 he retired as CTO and became Chief Scientist of DALSA Digital Imaging.   This shift allows him to focus more on the field of training and teaching solid-state image sensor technology. In 2005 he founded ETETIS (European Technical Expert Team on Image Sensors), a non-profit organization to promote European R&D activities in the field of solid-state image sensors. He is member of editorial board of the magazine "Photonics Spectra", an IEEE Fellow and member of SPIE.

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