Metal gates are considered a promising approach to increase transistor transconductance and to reduce gate resistance [1]. Tungsten gates, in particular, being a midgap work-function material are considered particularly useful in the case of short channel fully depleted SOI CMOS circuits. To introduce W as gate material, however, major technological challenges have to be faced and solved. Also, concerns related to the reliability of these new MOS stacks have to be taken into consideration. Indeed, the study of the reliability of metal gates with SiO2 is in itself particularly interesting from the point of view of the basic understanding of the dielectric breakdown (BD) phenomenon. In this paper we present first results on this subject.
By: F. Palumbo, S. Lombardo, J. H. Stathis, V. Narayanan, R. McFeely, J. J. Yurkas
Published in: RC23018 in 2003
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