Three-dimensional doping and diffusion in nano scaled devices as studied by atom probe tomography

Nowadays, technological developments towards advanced nano scale devices such as FinFETs and TFETs require a fundamental understanding of three-dimensional doping incorporation, activation and diffusion, as these details directly impact decisive parameters such as gate overlap and doping conformality and thus the device performance. Whereas novel doping methods such as plasma doping are presently exploited to meet these goals, their application needs to be coupled with new metrology approaches such as atom probe tomography, which provides the 3D-dopant distribution with atomic resolution. In order to highlight the relevant processes in terms of dopant conformality, 3D-diffusion, dopant activation and dopant clustering, in this paper we report on 3D-doping and diffusion phenomena in silicon FinFET devices. Through the use of atom probe tomography we determine the dopant distribution in a fully completed device which has been doped using the concept of self-regulatory plasma doping (SRPD). We extract the dopant conformality and spatial extent of this doping process and demonstrate that after annealing the resulting 3D-doping profiles and gate overlap are dependent on the details of the plasma doping process. We also demonstrate that the concentration-dependent 3D-diffusion process leads to concentration gradients which are different for the vertical versus the lateral direction. Through a statistical analysis of the dopant atom distributions we can identify dopant clustering in high concentration regions and correlate this with details of the dopant activation and, eventually, the device performance.