Compressive Strained Si1-XGex Channel for High Performance Gate-All-Around Nanosheet Transistors
Authors: Mochizuki Shogo , Li Juntao , Stuckert Erin , Zhou Huimei , Loubet Nicolas 
Published: November 2022

As scaling of conventional FinFET architecture to achieve target transistor density and performance becomes more complex and difficult, it is essential to attain a next generation transistor architecture. Horizontal Gate-All-Around (hGAA) nanosheet (NS) devices have attracted attention as a candidate to replace FinFETs at the 5nm technology node and beyond due to their excellent electrostatics and short channel control. Compared to scaled FinFET, stacked GAA NS offers circuit performance improvements with increased effective width per active footprint while also enabling gate length scaling. Exploring performance improvement techniques, such as channel strain engineering, is important for next generation CMOS technologies. It is difficult, however, to effectively induce strain into the channel region using source/drain stressors in scaled GAA NS structures due to reduction of the stressor (embedded SiGe in source/drain region) volume as transistor dimension shrinks. In addition, strain relaxation of source/drain stressors caused by introduction of crystalline defects decreases effectiveness to induce strain into the channel region. This is more pronounced by the fact that achieving superior epitaxial growth is more difficult on the GAA NS device structure due to the presence of inner spacer dielectric. Therefore, we proposed a stacked GAA NS pFET device with compressively strained SiGe channel. The SiGe channel NS devices were fabricated using Si NS channel trimming by selective isotropic dry etch and selective SiGe epitaxial growth techniques after the Si NS channel release (Fig. 1). This is the preferable scheme in terms of strain retention in the SiGe channel NS region since there are no patterning processes that cause strain relaxation during downstream processing.

To investigate the device characteristics of SiGe NS devices, we fabricated strained Si1-xGex (x = 0.2, 0.25, 0.3, and 0.35) channel NS pFET and investigated the crystallinity and strain in the channel region. Fig. 2 contains cross-sectional TEM images across the gate after Si0.7Ge0.3 channel formation. We observed no visible crystalline defects in the 4 nm-thick Si0.7Ge0.3 layer grown on the 2 nm-thick trimmed Si NS, indicating superior crystallinity of Si0.7Ge0.3 layer. To investigate strain in the nanoscale strained SiGe NS channel structures, Precession Electron Diffraction (PED) characterization was performed to evaluate lattice deformation of the stacked SiGe NS channel with 4 nm-thick Si0.7Ge0.3 epitaxial growth. Lattice deformation values are defined as the difference between in-plane lattice constants and the Si lattice constant, normalized by the Si lattice constant. Fig. 3 shows in-plane lattice deformation contour maps in the region of the stacked SiGe NS channel obtained from both X-cut (across the gate) and Y-cut (along the gate) for the SiGe NS structure with sheet width of 20 nm. The in-plane lattice deformation values were extracted from the middle of the SiGe NS channel as shown in Fig. 4. Preservation of half the amount of strain along the channel direction ([110]) was confirmed whereas strain along the NS width direction ([1-10]) was found to be almost fully relaxed due to elastic relaxation. This results in the Si0.7Ge0.3 channel being uniaxially stressed. The compressive stress along the channel direction estimated from the [110] lattice deformation is ~1 GPa.

Normalized hole mobility in the representative Si1-xGex channel NS pFET as a function of inversion carrier density (Ninv) is shown in Fig. 5. The hole mobility of Si1-xGex channel (x = 0.35) with Si cap is almost 100% higher than that of Si NS channel. The mobility benefit of Si1-xGex channel is attributed to reduced effective hole mass along the transport direction caused by a high compressive strain in the Si1-xGex channel.

The technique demonstrated in this study for forming compressively strained SiGe channel NS has great potential to improve pFET device performance for next generation of CMOS logic in GAA Nanosheet technology.

Figure 1