HF-Immersion Inductively Coupled Carrier Lifetime Characterization of Furnace-Oxide Growth

Metal contamination of silicon substrates can lead to yield and reliability problems with gate-oxides. Carrier recombination is extremely sensitive to the presence of metals. In this study, the HF-immersion inductively-coupled carrier lifetime measurement is used to isolate contamination effects arising from typical furnace-oxidation processes commonly used in integrated-circuit manufacture. The dry-oxidation processes, commonly employed in gate-oxidation, are essentially contamination free. The steam-oxidation process employed in field- oxidation can cause severe lifetime degradation (1 ms → 30 µs). The contaminant in our particular steam-oxidation tube has been identified by deep-level transient spectroscopy to be Fe at a level of ~ 4 × 10{sp11} cm{sp−3}.