AVS 53rd International Symposium
    Applied Surface Science Friday Sessions
       Session AS-FrM

Paper AS-FrM6
Characterization of Island Growth during Initial Stages of Atomic Layer Deposition of WNx on SiO2

Friday, November 17, 2006, 9:40 am, Room 2005

Session: Thin Film Characterization
Presenter: B.A. Carlson, Micron Technology
Authors: B.A. Carlson, Micron Technology
N. Ramaswamy, Micron Technology
P. Mrozek, Micron Technology
S. Hues, Micron Technology
Correspondent: Click to Email
Atomic layer deposited (ALD) Tungsten nitride (WNx) has been widely investigated for its application as gate electrodes,@footnote 1@ capacitor electrodes@footnote 2@ and barrier layers.@footnote 3@ For these applications, it is critical to understand the nucleation and growth behavior of WNx. In this paper we have investigated the initial stages of ALD WNx: nucleation, island growth and subsequent coalescence of islands to form a continuous film by various material characterization techniques such as time of flight secondary ion mass spectroscopy (TOFSIMS), angle resolved X-Ray photo electron spectroscopy (ARXPS), atomic force microscopy (AFM), X ray reflectivity (XRR) and electron probe microanalysis (EPMA). A simple phenomenological model based on surface area of islands during nucleation, growth and coalescence has been formulated to describe island growth in ALD. @FootnoteText@ @footnote 1@D.G. Park etal,. 2004 Symposium on VLSI Technology @footnote 2@B. Park, M. Lee, K. Moon, H. Lee, and H. Kang, IEEE International, Interconnect Technology Conference, Proceedings, San Francisco, 1-3 June, 1998, pp. 96-98. @footnote 3@M. Takeyama and A. Noya, Jpn. J. Appl. Phys., Part 1 36, 2261, 1997 .