Nitrogen dilution effects on structural and electrical properties of hot-wire-deposited a-SiN:H films for deep-sub-micron CMOS technologies

Hot-wire chemical vapor-deposited silicon nitride is a potential dielectric material compared to glow-discharge-deposited material due to its lower hydrogen content. In several earlier publications we have demonstrated these aspects of the HWCVD nitride. However, to replace SiO2 with a-SiN:H as the gate dielectric, this material needs further improvement. In this paper we report the results of our efforts to achieve this through nitrogen dilution of the SiH4+NH3 gas mixture used for deposition. To understand the electrical behavior of these nitride films, we characterized the films by high-frequency capacitance–voltage (HFCV) and DC J–E measurements. We attempted to evolve a correlation between the breakdown strength, as determined from the J–E curves, and aspects such as the bond density, etching rate, deposition rate and refractive index. From these correlations, we infer that nitrogen dilution of the source gas mixture has a beneficial effect on the physical and electrical properties of the hot-wire a-SiN:H films. For the highest dilution, we obtained a breakdown voltage of 12 MV cm−1