Laser Spike Annealing for Shallow Junctions in Ge CMOS

An annealing method capable of forming highly activated shallow junctions in Ge CMOS is still lacking. For the first time, nonmelt submillisecond laser spike annealing (LSA) is demonstrated to achieve high activation level, excellent diffusion control, and resulting low contact resistivity for both n-type and p-type Ge junctions when using P and B as the dopants, respectively. The thermal stability of the junctions activated by LSA is investigated. In addition, our results on Ge junctions and contacts are benchmarked systematically against published results using sheet resistance-junction depth (R
_s
-X
_j
) plots and contact resistivity-dopant concentration (ρ
_c
- N) plots.