Plasma-induced-damage (PID) free 29A nitrided gate oxide of 130 nm CMOS devices for high performance microprocessor manufacturing

This paper presents how root causes of PID to 29A Gate Oxide (Gox) in 130 nm CMOS devices for high performance /spl mu/P application were identified. Two types of failures of Gox capacitors (CAPs) were observed. One appeared as shorts of CAPs (Mode-A), while the other one creates a small distribution of lower breakdown field (Mode-B) of Gox CAPs. Through extensive experiments, these two types of failures were related to PID of two separate processing tools.