Synthesis of SOI material using low energy water ion implantation

SOI material plays an important role in the low-power, low-voltage IC technology. Its biggest drawback is high cost which mainly due to the long implantation time by conventional beamline implanter. An implanter without ion mass analyzer is applied to fabricate SOI materials by water ions implantation using pure water source. The masses of three dominant ion species in water vapor plasma, H/sub 2/O/sup +/, HO/sup +/, and O/sup +/, are very close which overcome the problem of co-existence of O/sup +/ and O/sub 2//sup +/ by oxygen plasma source. XTEM, HRTEM, EDXS, and SIMS results show a thin SOI is successfully fabricated by the implanter using 90 keV water ions implantation with dose ranges from 3/spl sim/6.5/spl times/10/sup 17/ cm/sup -2/ and subsequently high temperature annealing. The interfaces of Si/SiO/sub 2/ are smooth and sharp. The main metallic contamination comes from filament-tungsten, which congregate around the interfaces of the top Si layer.