Integrated NiSi defect reductions in 45nm node and beyond

Nickel silicide has been popular used for source/drain (S/D) contact materials in 45nm node and beyond in complementary metal-oxide semiconductor device because of its low silicon consumption and low sheet resistance loading among variant line widths, but the drawback is poor thermal stability which is easy to worsen pre-layer damage and induce leakage defects like piping, agglomeration. So some approaches like impurity engineering with fluorine and Pt additive for improving NiSi thermal stability, and annealing time and temperature optimization for gain and roughness improvement. Additionally, some thermal techniques for end-of-line (EOR) defect recovery were addressed to reduce leakage defects. This study successfully demonstrates three orders defect reduction by integrating them.