Laser spike annealing (LSA) is a disruptive technology which has been successfully demonstrated for advanced junction engineering-creating highly activated ultra-shallow junctions with near diffusion-less boundaries. These produce higher performing devices with improved drive currents and/or lower leakage currents, and provide design engineers more opportunities for product enhancements. LSA has become the "process of record" for a majority of the industry's high-performance, logic device manufacturers.LSA produces more uniform temperature and stress distributions in product wafers than lamp-based short time annealing processes. Furthermore, LSA is compatible with new materials such as strained Si, SiGe, high-k and metal gates, and is extendable to new device structures. This paper will review the current LSA capabilities, process and integration methods, summarize its unique capabilities to reduce temperature-induced stress and misalignment, and discuss future opportunities both in junction engineering and other integration areas.
LSA was first introduced into mainstream semiconductor manufacturing for logic IC's at the 65nm node, continuing the natural evolution of semiconductor thermal processing to higher temperatures (>1200 o C) and shorter times (100's of microseconds). The initial application was a simple one-step LSA to assist spike-RTA in dopant activation of the source/drain and polysilicon gate regions. Since then, LSA has proliferated to other junction engineering steps in the high temperature/low dwell time regime. As devices scale to sub-45nm nodes, there are opportunities for LSA to expand to alternative applications in other regions of temperature-time (T-t) process space. This paper will discuss the application of LSA to logic IC manufacturing within the framework of T-t process space, which is divided into three regimes: 1. High temperature, 2. Long dwell time, and 3. Low temperature. We describe how the design of the LSA system enables access to these three T-t regimes, and discuss current and future applications for each regime.
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