A unique process of fabricating a strained layer GexSi1−x on insulator is demonstrated. Such strained heterostructures are useful in the fabrication of high-mobility transistors. This technique incorporates well-established silicon processing technology e.g., ion implantation and thermal oxidation. A dilute GeSi layer is initially formed by implanting Ge+ into a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrate. Thermal oxidation segregates the Ge at the growing oxide interface to form a distinct GexSi1−x thin-film with a composition that can be tailored by controlling the oxidation parameters (e.g. temperature and oxidation ambient). In addition, the film thickness can be controlled by the implantation fluence, which is important since the film forms pseudomorphically below 2×1016 Ge/cm2. Continued oxidation consumes the underlying Si leaving the strained GeSi film encapsulated by the two oxide layers, i.e. the top thermal oxide and the buried oxide. Removal of the thermal oxide by a dilute HF etch completes the process. Strain relaxation can be achieved by either of two methods. One involves vacancy injection by ion implantation to introduce sufficient open volume within the film to compensate for the compressive strain. The other involves spontaneous relaxation of the film, which may depend, in part, upon the formation of GeO. If Ge is oxidized in the absence of Si, it evaporates as GeO(gas). Conditions under which this occurs will be discussed.

We have studied the crystallization of the yttrium - iron garnet (Y3Fe5O12, YIG) polycrystalline phase in thin films fabricated by means of pulsed laser deposition . Films were deposited on MgO substrates in vacuum, in argon, and in oxygen. A subsequent post-deposition heat treatment (annealing) was done at 800°C in air. We have shown that the crystallization of YIG was precluded by co-existent parasitic phases present in the as-deposited films. Specifically, the growth of the parasitic phase needs to be suppressed in order to get a single-phase polycrystalline YIG. Lowering the substrate temperature has been shown to be a simple and efficient way to suppress the growth of parasitic phase and to obtain good quality YIG films after thermal treatment. This procedure has been demonstrated to be successful even when the YIG films were grown in vacuum and their composition was significantly out of stoichiometry.

Electromigration behavior in Cu damascene wires was studied for various Cu grain struc-tures. The grain size was modulated by Cu linewidth and thickness, and by adjusting the wafer annealing process step after Cu electroplating and before Cu chemical mechanical polishing. A larger variation of Cu grain size between the samples was achieved on CMOS 65 nm node tech-nology than previous nodes which was due to the finer line width and thinner metal thickness. The Cu lifetime and mass flow in samples with bamboo, near bamboo, bamboo-polycrystalline mixture, and polycrystalline grain structures were measured. The effects of a Cu(2.5 wt.% Ti) alloy seed, Cu surface pre-clean, and selective electroless CoWP deposition techniques on Cu electromigration were also observed and a significantly improved Cu lifetime was found. The electromigration activation energies for Cu in Cu(Ti) alloy, along Cu/amorphous a-SiCxNyHz in-terface and grain boundary were found to be 1.3, 0.95 and 0.79 ± 0.05 eV, respectively. In addition the Cu line size effect on the Cu conductivity for Cu area less than 4×104 nm2 was found to be a linear function of the Cu line area.

The physical and electrical characteristics of La2O3 and LaAlO3 films, deposited by atomic layer deposition (ALD) and using a new La formamidinate precursor (La-FAMD), were investigated. The La-FAMD precursor has superior thermal stability and is also the most volatile La source available today. The vapor pressure of La-FAMD, maintained at 100 ºC, is approximately 60 times higher than the commercial available source La-THD (THD = tetramethylheptanedionato).

Silicon nitride films were deposited by hot-wire chemical vapor deposition processes (HW-CVD). The films reveal a morphological structure very similar to nitrides formed in low pressure CVD (LP-CVD) or plasma enhanced CVD (PE-CVD) processes. The electrical breakdown voltages, however, are much smaller for HW- than PE- or LPCVD films. The deposition in holes for isolation purpose in “through silicon vias” (TSV) technologies in combination with optical devices, which require very low temperatures (<200 °C), have been investigated. They reveal sufficiently good properties for the planned applications.

The effects of total surface roughness of Cu bond layers and applied load during bonding on the bond strength and the contact resistance of the bonded interface were studied for three-dimensional (3D) devices. The 3D structures were fabricated by thermocompression bonding of two wafers, each fabricated with a Cu damascene process. The average bond strength of the samples was found to increase with increasing load, and with decreasing roughness. On the other hand, the average contact resistance increased as the total surface roughness of the bonded interface increased, as well as when the applied load decreased. The increase in bond strength (and also the dicing yield) is related to a smaller true contact area, which can be estimated using a model based on contact mechanics theory. The theory takes into account the roughness of the bonded surface, the applied load during bonding and the nominal bond area. A contact resistance model can also be used to estimate the contact resistance of bonded interfaces based on their true contact area. However, within each set of measurements, a significant spread about the average value of bond strength and contact resistance was observed, suggesting issues of contact and bonding non-uniformity of the wafers. Nonetheless, the contact resistance values given by the model were in good agreement with the minimum values observed in experiments, which may represent the ideal cases of bonding of rough surfaces. Our results show that the impact of surface roughness and applied load on the contact resistance of Cu-Cu thermocompression bonds can be quantified experimentally, and understood in the context of established theory for contact mechanics.