Monolithically Integrated Microheater for On-Chip Annealing of Oxide Defects

An on-chip annealing system based on a monolithically integrated microheater is presented. As the test chip, complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor transistors based on 22-nm node are fabricated using commercial foundry technology. Then, the microheater is integrated on a thinned wafer backside by shadow mask patterning. The thermal power efficiency was examined experimentally and verified by numerical simulation. The system on microheater provides 90% restoration of integrity of the gate oxide at 200 °C for 10 min and full recovery around 2 h. Since the backside microheater fabrication is independent of the front-side circuitry, the on-chip annealing scheme can be implemented on any arbitrary commercial-off-the-shelf device as a generic approach.