|
High-κ Dielectric
In the semiconductor industry, the term high-κ dielectric refers to a material with a high dielectric constant (κ, kappa), as compared to silicon dioxide. High-κ dielectrics are used in semiconductor manufacturing processes where they are usually used to replace a silicon dioxide gate dielectric or another dielectric layer of a device. The implementation of high-κ gate dielectrics is one of several strategies developed to allow further miniaturization of microelectronic components, colloquially referred to as extending Moore's Law. Sometimes these materials are called "high-k" (pronounced "high kay"), instead of "high-κ" (high kappa). Need for high-κ materials Silicon dioxide () has been used as a gate oxide material for decades. As metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) have decreased in size, the thickness of the silicon dioxide gate dielectric has steadily decreased to increase the gate capacitance (per unit area) and thereby drive current (per ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semiconductor Industry
The semiconductor industry is the aggregate of companies engaged in the design and fabrication of semiconductors and semiconductor devices, such as transistors and integrated circuits. Its roots can be traced to the invention of the transistor by Shockley, Brattain, and Bardeen at Bell Labs in 1948. Bell Labs licensed the technology for $25,000, and soon many companies, including Motorola (1952), Schockley Semiconductor (1955), Sylvania, Centralab, Fairchild Semiconductor and Texas Instruments were making transistors. In 1958 Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild independently invented the Integrated Circuit, a method of producing multiple transistors on a single "chip" of Semiconductor material. This kicked off a number of rapid advances in fabrication technology leading to the exponential growth in semiconductor device production, known as Moore's law that has persisted over the past six or so decades. The industry's annual semiconductor sale ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Capacitor
In electrical engineering, a capacitor is a device that stores electrical energy by accumulating electric charges on two closely spaced surfaces that are insulated from each other. The capacitor was originally known as the condenser, a term still encountered in a few compound names, such as the '' condenser microphone''. It is a passive electronic component with two terminals. The utility of a capacitor depends on its capacitance. While some capacitance exists between any two electrical conductors in proximity in a circuit, a capacitor is a component designed specifically to add capacitance to some part of the circuit. The physical form and construction of practical capacitors vary widely and many types of capacitor are in common use. Most capacitors contain at least two electrical conductors, often in the form of metallic plates or surfaces separated by a dielectric medium. A conductor may be a foil, thin film, sintered bead of metal, or an electrolyte. The nonconductin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Atomic Layer Deposition
Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is a thin-film deposition technique based on the sequential use of a gas-phase chemical process; it is a subclass of chemical vapour deposition. The majority of ALD reactions use two chemicals called wiktionary:precursor, precursors (also called "reactants"). These precursors react with the surface of a material one at a time in a sequential, self-limiting, manner. A thin film is slowly deposited through repeated exposure to separate precursors. ALD is a key process in semiconductor device fabrication, fabricating semiconductor devices, and part of the set of tools for synthesizing nanomaterials. Introduction During atomic layer deposition, a film is grown on a substrate by exposing its surface to alternate gaseous species (typically referred to as Precursor (chemistry), precursors or reactants). In contrast to chemical vapor deposition, the precursors are never present simultaneously in the reactor, but they are inserted as a series of sequential, no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zirconium Dioxide
Zirconium dioxide (), sometimes known as zirconia (not to be confused with zirconium silicate or zircon), is a white crystalline oxide of zirconium. Its most naturally occurring form, with a monoclinic crystalline structure, is the mineral baddeleyite. A dopant stabilized cubic structured zirconia, cubic zirconia, is synthesized in various colours for use as a gemstone and a diamond simulant. Production, chemical properties, occurrence Zirconia is produced by calcining zirconium compounds, exploiting its high thermostability.Ralph Nielsen "Zirconium and Zirconium Compounds" in Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry, 2005, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim. Structure Three phases are known: monoclinic below 1170 °C, tetragonal between 1170 °C and 2370 °C, and cubic above 2370 °C. The trend is for higher symmetry at higher temperatures, as is usually the case. A small percentage of the oxides of calcium or yttrium stabilize in the cubic phase. The very r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hafnium Dioxide
Hafnium is a chemical element; it has symbol Hf and atomic number 72. A lustrous, silvery gray, tetravalent transition metal, hafnium chemically resembles zirconium and is found in many zirconium minerals. Its existence was predicted by Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869, though it was not identified until 1922, by Dirk Coster and George de Hevesy. Hafnium is named after , the Latin name for Copenhagen, where it was discovered. Hafnium is used in filaments and electrodes. Some semiconductor fabrication processes use its oxide for integrated circuits at 45 nanometers and smaller feature lengths. Some superalloys used for special applications contain hafnium in combination with niobium, titanium, or tungsten. Hafnium's large neutron capture cross section makes it a good material for neutron absorption in control rods in nuclear power plants, but at the same time requires that it be removed from the neutron-transparent corrosion-resistant zirconium alloys used in nuclear reactors. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zirconium Silicate
Zirconium silicate, also zirconium orthosilicate, ZrSiO4, is a chemical compound, a silicate of zirconium. It occurs in nature as zircon, a silicate mineral. Powdered zirconium silicate is also known as zircon flour. Zirconium silicate is usually colorless, but impurities induce various colorations. It is insoluble in water, acids, alkali and aqua regia. Hardness is 7.5 on the Mohs scale. Structure and bonding Zircon consists of 8-coordinated Zr4+ centers linked to tetrahedral orthosilicate SiO44- sites. The oxygen atoms are all triply bridging, each with the environment OZr2Si. Given its highly crosslinked structure, the material is hard, and hence prized as gemstone and abrasive. Zr(IV) is a d0 ion. Consequently the material is colorless and diamagnetic. Production Zirconium silicate occurs in nature as mineral zircon. Concentrated sources of zircon are rare. It is mined from sand deposits and separated by gravity. Some sands contain a few percent of zircon. It can als ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hafnium Silicate
Hafnium silicate is the hafnium(IV) salt of silicic acid with the chemical formula of HfSiO4. Thin films of hafnium silicate and zirconium silicate grown by atomic layer deposition, chemical vapor deposition or MOCVD, can be used as a high-k dielectric as a replacement for silicon dioxide in modern semiconductor devices. The addition of silicon to hafnium oxide increases the band gap, while decreasing the dielectric constant. Furthermore, it increases the crystallization temperature of amorphous films and further increases the material's thermal stability with Si at high temperatures. Nitrogen is sometimes added to hafnium silicate for improving the thermal stability and electrical properties of devices. Natural occurrence Hafnon is the natural form of hafnium orthosilicate. Its name suggests the mineral is the Hf analogue of much more common zircon Zircon () is a mineral belonging to the group of nesosilicates and is a source of the metal zirconium. Its chemical name is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electron Mobility
In solid-state physics, the electron mobility characterizes how quickly an electron can move through a metal or semiconductor when pushed or pulled by an electric field. There is an analogous quantity for Electron hole, holes, called hole mobility. The term carrier mobility refers in general to both electron and hole mobility. Electron and hole mobility are special cases of electrical mobility of charged particles in a fluid under an applied electric field. When an electric field ''E'' is applied across a piece of material, the electrons respond by moving with an average velocity called the drift velocity, v_d. Then the electron mobility ''μ'' is defined as v_d = \mu E. Electron mobility is almost always specified in units of square centimetre, cm2/(volt, V⋅second, s). This is different from the SI unit of mobility, square metre, m2/(volt, V⋅second, s). They are related by 1 m2/(V⋅s) = 104 cm2/(V⋅s). Electrical resistivity and conductivity, Conductivity is proportiona ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electronic Band Structure
In solid-state physics, the electronic band structure (or simply band structure) of a solid describes the range of energy levels that electrons may have within it, as well as the ranges of energy that they may not have (called ''band gaps'' or ''forbidden bands''). Band theory derives these bands and band gaps by examining the allowed quantum mechanical wave functions for an electron in a large, periodic lattice of atoms or molecules. Band theory has been successfully used to explain many physical properties of solids, such as electrical resistivity and optical absorption, and forms the foundation of the understanding of all solid-state devices (transistors, solar cells, etc.). Why bands and band gaps occur The formation of electronic bands and band gaps can be illustrated with two complementary models for electrons in solids. The first one is the nearly free electron model, in which the electrons are assumed to move almost freely within the material. In this model, the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thermal Oxidation
In microfabrication, thermal oxidation is a way to produce a thin layer of oxide (usually silicon dioxide) on the surface of a wafer. The technique forces an oxidizing agent to diffuse into the wafer at high temperature and react with it. The rate of oxide growth is often predicted by the Deal–Grove model. Thermal oxidation may be applied to different materials, but most commonly involves the oxidation of silicon substrates to produce silicon dioxide. The chemical reaction Thermal oxidation of silicon is usually performed at a temperature between 800 and 1200 °C, resulting in a so-called High Temperature Oxide layer (HTO). It may use either water vapor (usually UHP steam) or molecular oxygen as the oxidant; it is consequently called either ''wet'' or ''dry'' oxidation. The reaction is one of the following: :\rm Si + 2H_2O \rightarrow SiO_2 + 2H_ :\rm Si + O_2 \rightarrow SiO_2 \, The oxidizing ambient may also contain several percent of hydrochloric acid (HCl). The chlo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Subthreshold Conduction
Subthreshold conduction or subthreshold leakage or subthreshold drain current is the electric current, current between the source and drain of a MOSFET when the transistor is in subthreshold region, or MOSFET#Modes of operation, weak-inversion region, that is, for gate-to-source voltages below the threshold voltage. The amount of subthreshold conduction in a transistor is set by its Threshold Voltage, threshold voltage, which is the minimum gate voltage required to switch the device between ''on'' and ''off'' states. However, as the drain current in a MOS device varies exponentially with gate voltage, the conduction does not immediately become zero when the threshold voltage is reached. Rather it continues showing an exponential behavior with respect to the subthreshold gate voltage. When plotted against the applied gate voltage, this subthreshold drain current exhibits a Semi-log plot, log-linear slope, which is defined as the subthreshold slope. Subthreshold slope is used as a fi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Threshold Voltage
The threshold voltage, commonly abbreviated as Vth or VGS(th), of a field-effect transistor (FET) is the minimum gate-to-source voltage (VGS) that is needed to create a conducting path between the source and drain terminals. It is an important scaling factor to maintain power efficiency. When referring to a junction field-effect transistor (JFET), the threshold voltage is often called pinch-off voltage instead. This is somewhat confusing since ''pinch off'' applied to insulated-gate field-effect transistor (IGFET) refers to the channel pinching that leads to current saturation behavior under high source–drain bias, even though the current is never off. Unlike ''pinch off'', the term ''threshold voltage'' is unambiguous and refers to the same concept in any field-effect transistor. Basic principles In n-channel ''enhancement-mode'' devices, a conductive channel does not exist naturally within the transistor. With no VGS, dopant ions added to the body of the FET form a region ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
