International Business Machines Corporation

Frederick William Buehrer

Bruce Bennett Doris

David V Horak

Haining S Yang

Dureseti Chidambarrao

Wesley Charles Natzle

Chienfan Yu

Sadanand Vinayak Deshpande

Scott W Crowder

Hung Y Ng

Len Yuan Tsou

William M Chu

Hsiang-Jen Huang

Derek Chen

A stressed film applied across a boundary defined by a structure or a body (e.g. substrate or layer) of semiconductor material provides a change from tensile to compressive stress in the semiconductor material proximate to the boundary and is used to modify boron diffusion rate during annealing and thus modify final boron concentrations. In the case of a field effect transistor, the gate structure may be formed with or without sidewalls to regulate the location of the boundary relative to source/drain, extension and/or halo implants. Different boron diffusion rates can be produced in the lateral and vertical directions and diffusion rates comparable to arsenic can be achieved. Reduction of junction capacitance of both nFETs and pFETs can be achieved simultaneously with the same process steps.

Reduction of boron diffusivity in pFETs

A blocking layer is formed on a hard mask having an initial thickness. Lines are fabricated by patterning the blocking layer and the hard mask to provide a line segment, the line segment having a first dimension measured across the line segment; reacting a surface layer of the line segment to form a layer of a reaction product on a remaining portion of the line segment; and removing the reaction product without attacking the remaining portion of the line segment and without attacking the blocking layer and the substrate to form the line segment with a second dimension across the line segment that is smaller than the first dimension. The blocking layer prevents the formation of reaction product on the hard mask so that the initial thickness of the hard mask is maintained. The blocking layer can also serve as an ARC layer for photoresist patterning so that the use of an additional film layer is not required.

Vapor phase etch trim structure with top etch blocking layer

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Poughquag, NY, United States of America

Frederick William Buehrer