The leakage current in a CMOS image sensor (CIS) can have various origins. Leakage current investigations have focused on such things as cobalt-salicide, source and drain scheme, and shallow trench isolation (STI) profile. However, there have been few papers examining the effects on leakage current of nitride stringers that are formed by gate sidewall etching. So this study reports the results of a series of experiments on the effects of a nitride stringer on real display images. Different step heights were fabricated during a STI chemical mechanical polishing process to form different nitride stringer sizes, arsenic and boron were implanted in each fabricated photodiode, and the doping density profiles were analyzed. Electrons that moved onto the silicon surface caused the dark leakage current, which in turn brought up the speckle defect on the display image in the CIS.

This paper aims to develop a low gate source voltage (V gs ) N-LDMOS element that is fully operational at a CMOS Logic Gate voltage (3.3 or 5 V) realized using the 0.35 µm BCDMOS process. The basic structure of the N-LDMOS element presented here has a Low V gs LDMOS structure to which the thickness of a logic gate oxide is applied. Additional modification has been carried out in order to obtain features of an improved breakdown voltage and a specific on resistance (R sp ). A N-LDMOS element can be developed with improved features of breakdown voltage and specific on resistance, which is an important criterion for power elements by means of using a proper structure and appropriate process modification. In this paper, the structure has been made to withstand the excessive electrical field on the drain side by applying the double gate oxide structure to the channel area, to improve the specific on resistance in addition to providing a sufficient breakdown voltage margin. It is shown that the resulting modified N-LDMOS structure with the feature of the specific on resistance is improved by 31%, and so it is expected that optimized power efficiencies and the size-effectiveness can be obtained.

Back-end-of-line using ultra low-k (ULK; k < 2.5) has been required to reduce resistive capacitance beyond 45 nmtechnologies, because micro-processing units need higher speed and density. There are two strategies to manufacture ULK inter-layer dielectric (ILD) materials using an air-gap (k = 1). The former ULK and calcinations of ILD degrade the mechanical strength and induce a high cost due to the complication of following process, such as chemical mechanical polishing and deposition of the barrier metal. In contrast, the air-gap based low-k ILD with a relatively higher density has been researched on the trench-type with activity, but it has limited application to high density devices due to its high air-gap into the next metal layer. The height of air-gap into the next metal layer was reduced by changing to the via-typed air-gap, up to about 50% compared to that of the trench-typed air-gap. The controllable ULK was easily fabricated using the via-typed air-gap. It is thought that the via-type air-gap made the better design margin like via-patterning in the area with the dense and narrow lines.