Interaction of middle-of-line (MOL) temperature and mechanical stress on 90nm hi-speed device performance and reliability

In this paper, a study on middle-of-line (MOL) process on transistor performance and reliability was presented based on 300mm experimental data. The major MOL parameters that are affecting device performance and reliability are MOL thermal expense and mechanical stress from contact etches stop nitride liner. Based on the study, we had developed a robust 45nm gate-length CMOSFET for 90nm node high performance application. Aggressive gate length and gate dielectric scaling along with optimized MOL engineering has proven high performance devices similar to 65nm node CMOSFET (Nakahara et al., 2003).