Plasma Charging Damage In Advanced VLSI Manufacturing (BOOK)

Plasma charging damage is mainly a phenomenon of high-field stressing of thin gate-oxides during plasma processing. Any discussion of plasma charging damage cannot avoid the discussion of gate-oxide wear-out and breakdown under high field stress is a prerequisite for anyone who wishes to understand plasma charging damage. As the IC industry continues its relentless advance toward ever-smaller devices, the reliability of thin gate-oxide becomes increasingly more difficult to maintain. Somewhere around the 0.25microns generation of CMOS technology, the intrinsic breakdown lifetime of gate-oxide changes from being far longer than the expected service time (10 years) of a circuit to being the limiting factor. When the intrinsic lifetime of the thin oxide is barely long enough to meet reliability requirements of IC's, it is obvious that they are also least able to tolerate some of that lifetime being consumed by plasma charging damage.