| Unryu Ogawa, Dr.Eng. | MMT Equipment Design & Engineering Dept., Toyama Works, Semiconductor Equipment Div., |
| Kazuhiro Shimeno | MMT Equipment Design & Engineering Dept., Toyama Works, Semiconductor Equipment Div., |
| Noriyoshi Sato, Dr.Eng. | Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Engineering, |
| Ryoichi Furukawa | Process Development Dept., Device Development Center, |
In meeting the ever more advanced needs of semiconductor device fabrication processing, Hitachi Kokusai Electric Inc. has now developed an MMT (modified magnetron typed) low-temperature plasma processing system that is capable of meeting the demanding process windows for the next two generations, 90-nm and 65-nm technology nodes. Employing an MMT plasma source that generates soft plasma at an electron temperature of under 1 eV, Hitachi's plasma surface processing system deposits thin films over extremely fine featured semiconductor devices at low temperature and with excellent uniformity. More specifically, the system performs nitridation processing while depositing a high-quality oxide layer as the gate dielectric, the heart of the transistor, and is capable of depositing films with an EOT (equivalent oxide thickness) of less than 1.2 nm that is required by the generation after next 65-nm technology node. Compared to other kinds of plasma sources, the MMT low-temperature plasma processing method described here consumes relatively little power (about 1/10 the power consumed by other methods), and thus represents a new generation of semiconductor fab processing equipment that is environmentally friendly. This system will open the way to a wide range of 65-nm node and beyond future semiconductor processes enabling higher performance transistors through pre-processing of high-k films, formation of flash memory ONO (oxide-nitride-oxide) structures, deposition of capacitance dielectric films for DRAMs (dynamic random access memories), and deposition of thin films for VLSIs (very-large-scale integrated circuits).
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Hitachi Kokusai Electric Inc. |
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The Hitachi Hyoron (Japanese Only) |
plasma nitridation, plasma oxidation, plasma damage free, modified-magnetron typed plasma, low electron temperature plasma
