Eric Ma

5/11/2008
Queens College Physics Department

Progress of Moore’s Law: High-K Semiconductor Transistors

What is Moore’s Law?

Semiconductors are everywhere in electronics. From processors and digital

cameras to solar cells, semiconductors are the miracle material that makes modern

electronics possible. Moore’s Law, first observed by Intel’s cofounder Gordon E. Moore,

is not actually a “law” but a trend. He found that the performance of semiconductor based

electronics improves exponentially over a period of years. This amazing progress is due

to continuously easier and cheaper ways to make a semiconductor devices and

particularly one device: the transistor.

Cramming more transistors into a space is what makes processors run faster, gives

digital cameras more resolving power and makes computer memory bigger and better. On

top of that, the smaller transistors are becoming cheaper to manufacture per transistor, so

that the next, more powerful, generation of digital camera is cheaper than its predecessor.

This gives industry a huge incentive to improve the process of making transistor. Since

their invention, transistors shrank to the point where billions could be placed on a single

processor.

Think of the process of making a transistor as molding a piece of clay. You can

shape it, fire it, bake it, add impurities to it, but it is still basically clay. Scientists have

been improving transistors by making them smaller, using less and less “clay” to do the

same thing and finding better ways to mold it more precisely. It’s gotten to the point

where a single transistor is a mere hundred atoms wide. Transistors this small, however,

are running into significant physical boundaries. It’s like the walls of clay are too small to

do their job. Making smaller devices will require new materials that have yet to be
discovered and these materials will have to interact properly with the clay already there.

They has to “stick” to the clay, keep its properties through wear, survive the same

processes of firing that the clay does. If that is not possible then an entirely new process

will have to be invented. Still scientists are optimistic that these goals can be met. The

International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors predicts that these challenges

will be overcome in the near future1.

Figure 1: ITRS Roadmap

Transistors

Transistors are tiny switches that can be turned “on” or “off”. Typically they are

three pronged, with an electrode for the source, gate and drain. A small voltage can be

applied to the gate, determining whether a current can flow between the source and drain.

1
“Roadmap of Technology Characteristics.” ITRS. 5 December, 2007. 11 May, 2008.
http://www.itrs.net/Links/2007Winter/2007_Winter_Presentations/Presentations.html
When a current is allowed, the transistor is in its “on” state. This has been used to encode

trillions of bits of information on a single microprocessor.

MOSFETs

Figure 2: MOSFET design

The MOSFETs (above) are a type of transistor that is made predominately with

different types of silicon. One is called n-type which allows for excess electrons to flow

in the material. The other is p-type which allows positively charged holes to flow.

Making silicon p-type of n-type is a process of adding impurities to the silicon, called

doping. The two types of silicon are sandwiched together harmoniously. The blue is the

thinnest wall and is responsible for insulating the gate electrode from the charges in the

silicon.

The major advantage of MOSFETs is their low power consumption due to the

insulating layer between the surface of the semiconductor and the gate electrode. CMOS

circuits utilize MOSFETs to eliminate current flow (ideally) in operation except when

switching, reducing power use and heat generation.

Silicon

Silicon is a semiconductor and the miracle material that goes into making

transistors. Being a semiconductor silicon can play all the parts necessary to make a

transistor or any other electronic device. An entire circuit, including all its components

can be fabricated on a single wafer of silicon, eliminating the need for cumbersome wires
and macroscopic parts. It’s like making an entire building with doors, windows, stairs, an

elevator out of a single slab of clay.

One of the many advantage to silicon is a gift from nature that grows straight out

of any piece of silicon and has excellent insulating properties. Silicon dioxide (SiO2) is

the rust that forms on silicon and it is what forms that thin blue layer in MOSFET

diagram. The insulating parts of any silicon device could be formed to high uniformity

and interface quality by simply oxidizing the underlying silicon. How good of an

insulator a material is given by its dielectric constant (k), with higher dielectric constant

meaning better insulation. Silicon dioxide typically has a dielectric constant of 4,

compared with 1 for air or vacuum. The addition of nitrogen to the SiO2 improved

electrical performance delaying the replacement of SiO2 by a generation.

However, as devices have shrunk, the layer of SiO2 has not been thick enough to

prevent charges from passing through. This is a quantum effect. No matter how high the

potential boundary, if it is thin, a particle/wave can go straight through it without the

energy otherwise required to surmount the boundary. This is the walls of the clay

becoming so thin that water can leak out of them. As the SiO2 dielectric shrinks under

1.5nm, leakage resulting from quantum tunneling starts to consume a much larger

proportion of the power, a major hurdle in implementing smaller transistor sizes.2 This

also contributes to waste heat generated during operation. In the latest generation of

transistors, both power use and waste heat generated have increased. Replacing SiO2 with

a material that has better insulating properties (higher dielectric constant) such as

hafnium or zirconium was necessary for preventing gate leakage and thus increasing

performance 3. At the same time, the dielectric that replaced SiO2 allows for increase

2
Stathis, J.H. “Reliability limits for the gate insulator in CMOS technology.” IBM Research. 2007. 17
March, 2008. http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/462/stathis.txt.
3
Scansen, Don. “Under the Hood: Inside Intel’s 45-nm high-k metal-gate process.” EETimes. 14
November, 2007. 17 March 2008. http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202806020.
current speeds, also adding to the performance gains. This remarkable result was in no

way guaranteed. That SiO2 could even be replaced is a happy confluence of physical

properties of the new materials.

Figure 3: Recent generations of transistors at Intel

Engineering Challenges for Intel

The engineers at Intel have amazing challenges in finding and using a new

material to replace SiO2. Research at Intel started in the mid-1990’s4. However, progress

in the beginning years were stymied by charges being trapped on the gate-dielectric

boundary. The piling charge resulted in unwanted capacitance that effected the electrical

characteristics unpredictably.

This was a problem in the method used to deposit the dielectric. The two

processes used by industry, reactive sputtering and metal organic chemical vapor

deposition, while producing remarkably smooth surfaces, would not cut it for the new

use. The new method advanced by the team at Intel was called atomic layer deposition. It

calls for the introduction of a gas that reacts with the surface of the silicon wafer to coat it

with a smooth single layer of atoms. When the entire surface is coated the reaction stops,

not allowing further layering of the insulator. Then the gas is evacuated and a second gas

is introduced forming a second single layer of atoms. This is repeated until the right

number of layers is reached.

4
Bohr, Mark T., Chau, Robert S., Ghani, Tahir, Mistry, Kaizad. “The High-k Solution.” October 2007.
IEEE Spectrum. 11 May, 2008. http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/oct07/5553
 The new materials to replace SiO2 were problematic at first as well. They were

taking too much voltage to switch due to a property called Fermi-level pinning, and they

slowed the charge carriers current through the transistor impeding switching speed.

The problem was in the interaction between the polysilicon gate electrode and the

high-k crystal lattice. The high-k dielectric is invariably made of dipoles, molecules with

a positive end and negative end, which give it its insulating properties. These dipoles act

like rubber bands. When the electrons pass, they strike the lattice sending vibrations

throughout, called phonons, knocking the electrons around and impeding the speed of the

electrons. The effect, however, could be screened out by increasing the electron density.

The simplest way to do that was to replace the polysilicon gate electrode with a

conducting metal one. Replacing polysilicon with metal also led to better bonding

between the high-k dielectric and the gate, solving the other problem of Fermi-level

pinning.

In 1968, aluminum gate electrodes were replaced with a low-k polysilicon.

Aluminum-gate MOS transistors were three to four times slower, consumed twice as

much silicon area, had higher leakage current and lower reliability compared with

silicon-gate transistors5. Returning to a metal gate doesn’t seem to be revolutionary but

the re-replacement of polysilicon with a metal required yet another industry overhaul in

processes long embedded. It also required finding another two new materials, one metal

for PMOS and one for NMOS, with the correct properties, in this case the metal’s “work

function”.

The work function is the energy of an electron in the gate electrode relative to that

of an electron in the silicon channel. The electric field resulting from this energy

difference changes the speed at which the transistor turns on. The work function had to be
5
Faggin, Federico. “Silicon Gate Technology.” Intel4004. 11 May, 2008.
http://www.intel4004.com/sgate.htm
close to that of polysilicon, and none of the materials tested quite fit, but the engineering

team found a way to change the work function of the metal to precisely what they

needed.

The engineering team also found it inconvenient to fabricate the transistor with

the normal “gate-first” method. During the “gate first” method, the source and drain are

implanted onto the gate, and annealed to repair any damage during the implantation.

Annealing puts the transistor under high temperatures and puts another constraint on the

metal; it has to withstand high temperatures. The annealing process also changed the

work function of the gate. Rather than dealing with the hassle, the Intel team decided to

add the gate after the annealing process, flipping the fabrication process on its head.

Intel’s 45nm Transistors

These new processes and materials were slated for development for the 45nm

transistor node. In early January 2007, Intel introduced the first working 45nm

microprocessors. Called the Penryn, it was smaller and performed better than the 65nm

generation.

Figure 3: Intel scaling trend

 Considering how many basic process changes there were, the new transistors

performed surprisingly well. Gate leakage was reduced by over 25 times for the NMOS

and 1000 times for the PMOS transistors6 (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Leakage reductions for 45nm transistors

Drive current, the speed of charge carriers through the transistor which reflects

performance, also improved. NMOS drive current improved 16% and PMOS drive

currents improved 50%. (Figures 5, 6)

Figure 5: PMOS drive current improvement

6
http://download.intel.com/technology/IEDM2007/variation.pdf
 Figure 6: NMOS drive current improvement

Conclusion

The replacement of SiO2 with high-k dielectrics is only the first step towards

continuing Moore’s Law, however it is crucial. The materials and process challenge was

an effective wall to Moore’s Law that could very well have halted its progress. There is

much more work to be done to overcome the next generation of challenges, but with

these daunting challenges overcome the momentum already favors accelerating progress.