Impact of Post-Metal Annealing With Deuterium or Nitrogen for Curing a Gate Dielectric Using Joule Heat Driven by Punch-Through Current

Transistor-level annealing via the self-heating effect is useful for curing degraded gate dielectric in terms of quality and reliability. It has been speculated that the curing characteristics depend on the device state after post-metal annealing, but no conclusive evidence has been found so far. This work experimentally confirms the relationship between passivation gas species and curing characteristics during transistor-level annealing. It was confirmed that the existence of deuterium in a device was strongly associated with curing behavior.