Gate leakage properties on n-MOSFET with plasma oxidized and nitrided

SiO
2
or nitrided SiO
2
has been employed as the gate dielectric of the scale downed MOSFETs below 100nm gate length. Silicon oxynitrided (SiON) is known to be highly resistive to hot carrier injection phenomenon [1,2]. Over-injected nitrogen, however, is detrimental to the reliability of very small scale MOSFETs. Nevertheless, the nitrided oxide reduces the equivalent oxide thickness (EOT) and suppresses the boron penetration from the p
⁺
-Si gate of p-MOSFET into the SiO
2
/Si [3]. Hence, SiON is a promising candidate for the gate insulators for the future MOS device applications. Recently, the SiO
2
using nitrogen plasma or ions has been investigated to fabricate SiON at low temperature conditions [4,5]. Although the ion bombardment can enhances nitridation reactions at Si surface by providing sufficient reaction energy to the Si surface, the oxide degradation caused by plasma damage is a serious problem. In other words, the increased power consumption accelerated the oxide degradation and the higher gate leakage current was accompanied. Therefore, the state of the art technology is essentially needed to minimize the gate leakage. Especially, because the data is a programmed/erased at the floating poly in Flash Memory, charge loss through gate oxide in room temperature is a key item to determine process parameters and conditions. In this paper, we investigated the material and electrical properties of the newly developed gate dielectrics fabricated by using the thermally grown radical oxidation (TGRO) subsequently followed the plasma re-oxidation (PO) and nitridation (PN) in N
2
plasma, in a low.