Mechanical stress effect of etch-stop nitride and its impact on deep submicron transistor design

This paper, focusing on the effect of a plasma-enhanced CVD (PECVD) nitride contact-etch-stop layer, reports that process-induced mechanical stress affects the performance of short-channel CMOSFETs. We argue that the internal stress in the nitride layer changes transconductance (G/sub m/), thereby degrading NMOSFET performance by up to 8% and improving PMOSFET performance up to 7%. These performance changes are caused by changes of the electron and hole mobilities, so a precise transistor model considering this mobility change is necessary for deep-submicron transistor design.