《Iron and its complexes in silicon》.pdf

Appl. Phys. A 69, 13–44 (1999) / Digital Object Identifier (DOI) 10.1007/s003399900059  Springer-Verlag 1999 Invited paper Iron and its complexes in silicon A.A. Istratov , H. Hieslmair, E.R. Weber Department of Materials Science and Engineering of the University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, MS 62-203, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA (E-mail: istratov@socrates.berkeley.edu; hhiesl@argon.eecs.berkeley.edu; weber@socrates.berkeley.edu) Received: 14 December 1998Accepted: 22 February 1999Published online: 26 May 1999 Abstract. This article is the first in a series of two reviews structures, iron can precipitate at the Si–SiO2 interface, thus on the properties of iron in silicon. It offers a comprehensive locally thinning the oxide and increasing surface roughness. summary of the current state of understanding of fundamen- This causes premature electric field breakdown of oxides and tal physical properties of iron and its complexes in silicon. degrades the gate oxide integrity (GOI) [1–7]. In the deple- The first section of this review discusses the position of iron tion regions of MOS devices, iron acts as an effective minor- in the silicon lattice and the electrical properties of interstitial ity carrier generation site [7,8], increasing the dark current of iron. Updated expressions for the solubility and the diffusiv- charge-coupled devices (CCD) [9] and causing refresh fail-