Study on mechanism of thermal curing in ultra-thin gate dielectrics

In order to realize the sustainable devices, thermal curing technologies by self-heating are attracting attention recently. In order to understand the progression of the recovery by heating, in this paper, the thermal curing of the deteriorations at gate oxide interfaces under TDDB-like high-voltage stressing was investigated in PFETs and NFETs. As results, the damage in PFETs can be recovered even by low temperature annealing (~300°C), but in the case of NFETs, the damage at SiO ₂ /Si interface generated under high-voltage stressing is hard to be recovered, suggesting the existence of the other mechanism compared to the case of PFETs.