Experimental & computational studies on transition-metal silicides for novel applications in advance CMOS technologies

Abstract

Transition-metal silicides have been widely used in complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) ultra-large-scale integration technologies. Rapid pace of development leads semiconductor industry exciting but facing a lot of challenges. As device features shrink to nanoscale, new architectures and materials have to be employed. Silicides have been extensively studied for a few decades both experimentally and theoretically. However, most of the studies have been carried out on the conventional bulk Si substrate. Silicides for advanced CMOS technologies are still under studied due to the lack of effective characterization tools and their formation mechanisms are still far from deep understanding. The goal of this research is to fill in some of the technical gaps through both experimental and theoretical approaches, including electrical property and thermal stability of ultra-thin silicide films, impact of stain on atomic and band structures of the Si/silicide interface, and formation and stability affected by the composition of Ge in SiGe system.