Relationship between plasma damage, SILC and gate-oxide reliability

The debate on whether plasma-charging damage will become less of a problem or not when the gate-oxide is 30 /spl Aring/ or thinner has been going on for some time. This is, of course, a very important question. We showed, in a previous publication (Cheung et al., 1998), that charging damage continues to be a serious problem for ultra-thin gate-oxides when a high-density plasma is used. In this paper, we show that even when low-density plasma is used, charging damage is also a serious problem for ultra-thin gate-oxides by looking at the relationship between plasma damage, stress-induced leakage current (SILC) and gate oxide reliability.