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News Article

SiGen takes uniaxial strain across wafer

Silicon Genesis (SiGen) has successfully developed wafer-level uniaxial strained substrates. Until now, only local transistor-level uniaxial strain has been available. The company has called the wafer-level technique "Next-Generation Strain" (NGS).
Silicon Genesis (SiGen) has successfully developed wafer-level uniaxial strained substrates. Until now, only local transistor-level uniaxial strain has been available. The company has called the wafer-level technique "Next-Generation Strain" (NGS).

Uniaxial strain avoids mobility degradation and the high defect levels associated with current silicon-germanium (SiGe) based biaxially strained silicon or strained silicon on insulator (s-SOI), says SiGen. Several chip manufacturers, including Intel and Texas Instruments, have demonstrated benefits of uniaxial strain at the local, transistor level. Intel pioneered the use of uniaxial strain-enhanced transistor technology and is already using it in its 90nm process.

Francois J Henley, SiGen president and CEO, comments: "This new material offers the potential for significant mobility enhancements over SiGe-based biaxial strain wafer technologies and is compatible with local straining approaches since the strains are additive. It also features very low defect levels due to SiGen's use of its proprietary low-temperature processing technology. It can be directly integrated on silicon as an "epi-like" strained bulk wafer or on an insulator as a strained silicon-on-insulator wafer (s-SOI). The incremental production costs are expected to be significantly lower than biaxial technologies because it avoids the costly steps of growing and relaxing thick silicon-germanium layers."

Dr Scott Thompson, University of Florida associate professor and former Intel Fellow Director of Intel's 90nm Logic Technology and Strained Silicon Program, adds: "Uniaxial strain is now being recognized as the preferred strain type for deep-submicron device applications, and its local variant has displaced global biaxial strain as the mobility enhancer of choice. Biaxial strain has been plagued with process integration issues such as high defect levels and germanium inter-diffusion, but more importantly is much less efficient in boosting PMOS transistor performance. Local uniaxial strain processes are already enhancing 90nm performance at many companies. The availability of a global uniaxially strained substrate can work with these existing approaches to substantially improve total transistor performance and has scaling advantages over local strain at the 45nm node and beyond. I look forward to the introduction and use of this new technology."

SiGen is actively pursuing the development and commercialisation of NGS with a number of partners.

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