- TEENA BABY

Introduction Basics of Strained silicon Types of strain Experiment results

More and more transistors every year Transistor size decreases exponentially But limit on transistor scaling

Gate voltage less than threshold voltage- no current When Vgs >Vth , inversion layer channel of electron formed Current mainly dependent on gate voltage

Sub threshold leakage current Drain induced barrier lowering Gate tunneling current Mobility degradation

Electronic band structure( E-K Diagram) Effective mass

Mobility

Stress applied to silicon Shift the valence and conduction band Decrease the in plane effective mass or increase the scattering time Enhancement in hole and electron mobility

Heavy and light holes in unstressed Si Stress warp the valence band Holes populate in lowest energy band Decreases in plane effective mass

Six fold degenerate conduction band valleys Upon strain, split into two
Lower energy two fold degenerate valley Higher energy four fold degenerate valley

Low in plane mass for two fold valley

Two types of strain

Compressive Tensile

Two directions of strain

Uniaxial Biaxial

Biaxial techniques pioneered first Stress applied from two direction Increase both electron and hole mobility But no hole mobility improvement at high vertical electric fields Thus net advantage to be small

Stress applied from one direction Provide enhancement at low strain and high vertical electrical field Provide large drive current improvement Difficult to improve both electron and hole mobility simultaneously

Change the lattice constant of material Strain applied using strained Si on relaxed SiGe Biaxial tensile strain

Describes the change in resistance of semiconductor on application of stress due to band warping and energy shifting Valid under small stress where it varies linearly Hence used to quantify the mobility enhancement due to strain

Standard piezoresistance coefficients Channel direction <110> Transverse and longitudinal stress

pMOSFET- longitudinal compression using SiGe in source and drain nMOSFET- longitudinal tensile and out of plane compression using Sinitride capping layer

Easy to implement Increase mobility to a greater extent Provides enhancement at low strain and high vertical electric fields Integration challenges reduced

Strained silicon improves the mobility of charge carriers Uniaxial strain provides better performance at high fields Piezoelectric coefficients is used to quantify the improvement in mobility Increase in mobility continues as channel length decreases