Cleaning and passivation of the four horseman of the silicon apocalypse

In-situ atomic imaging of cleaning and passivation of several systems has been studied. (1) For InGaAs (001), a low temperature in-situ cleaning process has been combined with low temperature HfO2 ALD to reduce the EOT below 0.4 nm. (2) For InGaAs (110), STM/STS studies have shown that both a metal precursor (TMA) and an oxidant (H2O) are required to remove trap states. (3) To assist in utilizing similar gate and contact processing on group IV and InGaAs surfaces, a silicon monolayer ALD process has been developed for InGaAs (001). (4) SiGe combines the most challenging components of cleaning Si and Ge; using a reaction with HOOH (g) and post deposition annealing, SiGe (001) becomes terminated with Si-OH which is nearly ideal for ALD nucleation.