New guideline for hydrogen treatment in advanced system LSI

In this paper, we focus on hydrogen related processes and its impact on system LSI. Hydrogen affects not only DRAM performance but also reliability characteristics for MOSFET such as NBTI (negative bias temperature instability), HCI (hot carrier injection), and TDDB. We demonstrate that NBTI and HCI are degraded by excess hydrogen while improving retention characteristics of eDRAM. It is shown for the first time that anomalous degradation in TDDB for downsized MOSFET is caused by the compressive stress by STI and shows strong correlation to hydrogen processes. The optimization of hydrogen processes is indispensable for highly reliable system LSI in future generations.