R-4 Surface Control And Thin Gate Oxides

Summary form only given. The electrical properties of thermally grown ultrathin Si02 layers on Si are a critical issue for the characteristics of deep submicron CMOS devices. For these ultra-thin sub-3-nm gate oxides, direct quantum mechanical tunneling of electrons between the poly-Si gate and the Si-substrate becomes very important. Little is known about the ultra-thin oxide reliiability in this case. Many issues are also still open cm the surface preparation/cleaning technology needed to produce these layers with sufficiently low defect dlensity.