Performance and reliability of advanced High-K/Metal gate stacks (Invited Paper)

This paper provides a systematic study of mobility performance and Bias Temperature Instabilities (BTI) reliability in advanced dielectrics stacks. By studying a large variety of dielectric stacks we clearly demonstrate that mobility performance, interface defects Nit and Negative BTI reliability are strongly correlated. All are affected by nitrogen species N which is clearly identified as the main mobility killer when it reaches unintentionally the Si interface during the deposition of nitrided gates or the nitridation steps.