On the scalability of source/drain current enhancement in thin film sSOI

This paper demonstrates for the first time the scalability of source/drain current enhancement on low-doped thin film strained silicon on insulator (sSOI) substrate. Current improvement is maintained in narrow channel NFETs despite the relaxation from biaxial to uniaxial tensile strain after mesa patterning. Using strained contact etch-stop layers (sCESL), additional boost is achieved in short devices, resulting in 50% improvement in the drive current of 50 nm gate length devices with respect to conventional reference SOI process.