Rapid thermal post-metallization annealing effect on thin gate oxides

Rapid thermal processing is used for post-metallization annealing (PMA) in this work. It was found that the rapid thermal PMA can do almost the same anneal work in the initial characteristics of MOS capacitors with an oxide thickness of 10 nm as the conventional furnace PMA. But the reliabilities in hot-carrier and radiation resistances of MOS capacitors depend on the PMA process significantly. It was found that rapid thermal PMA samples exhibit worse properties in hot-carrier resistance but better properties in radiation hardness than furnace PMA samples. For rapid thermal PMA process, the higher the annealing temperature, the stronger the initial annealing extent but the worse the hot-carrier and the radiation resistances.