BURIED OXIDE FORMATION BY PLASMA IMMERSION ION-IMPLANTATION

Although separation by implantation of oxygen (SIMOX) is an attractive approach for fabricating silicon-on-insulator (SOI) materials for rad iation-hardened electronic devices and high-speed CMOS circuits, the p roduction cost is high. The novel technique of plasma immersion ion im plantation (PIII) emulates the traditional beamline technique in many aspects. Some of the advantages are: no mass selection, no beam transp ort optics, large area implantation, high ion flux, short implantation time, and low costs. We used Pill and oxygen implantation (nominal do se: 5x10(17) atoms/cm(2)) to form thin buried oxide layers in the sub- mtorr operating pressure regime. A 20-50 nm thick buried oxide layer w ith a Si overlayer thickness of 20-50 nm was fabricated in about 5 min . The implanted wafers were capped with a nitride layer and subsequent ly annealed for 6 h at 1300 degrees C in a nitrogen ambient to remove the damage. The resulting wafers were analyzed using a variety of tech niques, including RES and XTEM.