High tensile stress with minimal dopant diffusion by low temperature microwave anneal

In this letter, rapid thermal annealing (RTA) and microwave annealing (MA) are compared to demonstrate the dopant activation. Using microwave annealing, the dopant in the Si was well-activated and showed suppressed dopant diffusion, as compared to traditional high temperature RTA. In addition, SiN_x films after low temperature MA treatment presented higher tensile stress than the films annealed by RTA. Therefore, this MA approach could potentially be applied to these behaviors of I distribution and higher tensile stress SiN _x film may be useful in contact etch-stop layer or stress memorization technique in the fabrication of small pitch nanoscaled n-channel Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors.