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Use of a Purged FOUP to Improve H-Terminated Silicon Surface Stability Prior to Epitaxial Growth

Wednesday, 8 October 2014: 16:05
Expo Center, 1st Floor, Universal 8 (Moon Palace Resort)
K. Wostyn (IMEC), D. Rondas, K. Kenis, R. Loo (imec vzw), A. Y. Hikavyy (IMEC), B. Douhard, P. W. Mertens, F. Holsteyns (imec vzw), S. De Gendt (imec vzw, University of Leuven), L. D'Urzo, and L. Van Autryve (Entegris)
A H-terminated Si surface serves as the starting surface for hetero-epitaxial growth. The presence of oxygen on the wafer surface caused by surface re-oxidation can significantly reduce the epitaxial quality. In this paper we evaluated the capabilities of an Entegris EBM (Entegris Barrier Material) purged FOUP (Front-Opening-Unified-Pod) to reduce this re-oxidation.  

The surface cleanliness is one of the factors affecting (hetero-) epitaxial quality. Clean starting surfaces can be obtained by a high temperature H2-bake (T > 800 °C). [1] Surface reflow during these high temperature bakes can significantly impact the integrity of small structures, e.g. causing corner rounding of FINFET structures. [2] As the clean starting surface can no longer be obtained by the H2-bake at relative high temperatures, more stringent requirements are put on the pre-epi clean and on the impact of queue time between wet-chemical clean and epitaxial growth. We have evaluated the re-oxidation of H-terminated 300 mm Si surfaces in a non-purged FOUP compared to an EBM purged FOUP while the FOUP is open and docked to the factory interface.

Re-oxidation or degradation of the H-terminated Si surface has been evaluated by capping the surface with an epitaxial-grown 80nm Si-cap/80nm Si0.8Ge0.2 bilayer. The H-terminated surface was created in a separate step before the epitaxial growth by applying a thermal treatment in H2 in a conventional ASM Epsilon3200 epi reactor. The Si wafer was unloaded in between the thermal treatment and the Si-cap/SiGe epitaxial growth step. This procedure offers the most-controllable scheme for creating a H-passivated surface but the learnings are also applicable to wet-chemical pre-epi treatments.  The Si0.8Ge0.2 / Si substrate interfacial cleanliness was evaluated at the center of the wafer by SIMS (Fig. 1). The EBM purged FOUP shows a lower interfacial degradation compared to the standard FOUP. The uniformity of the surface degradation has been investigated by surface light scattering (data not shown). While the light-scattering intensity and its range increased significantly after queuing for 1hr in a non-purged FOUP, this increase was suppressed when using the N2-purged FOUP. The light scattering measurements also show that the epitaxial quality is better in a N2-purged FOUP compared to a non-purged FOUP but degraded compared to the loadlock reference.

In this paper we evaluated the impact of queue time of an H-terminated Si surface in a non-purged FOUP compared to an EBM N2-purged FOUP. The interfacial degradation as measured by light scattering and SIMS for 1hr of queue time is shown to be less when the EBM N2-purged FOUP is used. However the epitaxial quality degradation was shown not to be completely suppressed.

References

 [1] R. Loo et al. Solid State Phenomena 145-146, (2009) 177

[2] N. Sato et al. Appl. Phys. Lett. 65 (1994) 1924

Figure 1: Degradation of the Si0.8Ge0.2-on-Si interface as measured by SIMS. The interfacial oxygen concentration is plotted as a function of the queuing condition.