Development of thermal neutron SER-resilient high-k/metal gate technology

We report the experimental procedure and data that establishes the correlation between natural boron (B
¹⁰
) concentration and thermal neutron soft error rate (SER) in an advanced 28nm high-k/metal gate (HK/MG) technology node. Thermal neutron induced singe event upsets (SEU) depend on the concentration of B
¹⁰
in the contact process adopted for boosting SRAM performance. However, as technology rapidly evolves in terms of transistor feature size and overall design complexity, B
¹⁰
concentration needs to decrease so as to reduce thermal neutron SER risk. Optimization of contact and eSiGe process can provide a technology profile that is robust against thermal and high energy neutron SER.