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Chapter 1 Introduction and Historical Perspective

1. Introduction.
2. Growth of IC – Moore’s law.
3. Some history in IC industry.
4. Semiconductors.
5. Semiconductor devices, semiconductor technology families.

NE 343: Microfabrication and thin film technology

Instructor: Bo Cui, ECE, University of Waterloo; http://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~bcui/

Textbook: Silicon VLSI Technology by Plummer, Deal and Griffin

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0 ! =  1 

علاش ؟

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State of art ICs manufactured in the 1990s.

Introduction

• This course is basically about silicon chip fabrication, the technologies used to manufacture ICs (CPU, memory – DRAM, flash…).
• However, the same technology is also widely used for applications other than ICs, such as large area displays (LCD), hard disk drive, semiconductor lasers, MEMS (microelectromechanical systems), lab-on-a-chip, solar cell….
• For nano-application, microfabrication is the basis for nanofabrication; with the major differences is that photolithography is used for microfabrication whereas nano-lithography (electron beam lithography…) is used for nanofabrication.
• Therefore, you will find this course very useful even though most of you will not work in the IC industry after graduation.

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Basic fabrication components

Three components for micro- and nano-fabrication:

Lithography (lateral patterning): generate pattern in a material called resist

photolithography, electron-beam lithography, nanoimprint lithography…

Thin film deposition (additive): spin coating, chemical vapor deposition, molecular beam epitaxy, sputtering, evaporation, electroplating…

Etching (subtractive): reactive ion etching, ion beam etching, wet chemical etching, polishing…

Other techniques such as doping (ion implantation) is also important for semiconductor device.

A sequence of additive and subtractive steps with lateral patterning.

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One fabrication example

substrate

Metal nanostructures

1. Thin film growth

resist

(polymer)

2. Lithography

3. Deposition

4. Etching (dissolve resist)

Liftoff process

side view

metal nanostructures

substrate

1. Thin film growth

2. Lithography

3. Etching

4. Etching (dissolve resist)

Direct etch process

resist

(polymer)

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One more step: pillar array with various diameters

silicon

1. Cr dots by liftoff

2. RIE silicon and remove Cr

(RIE: reactive ion etching)

Cr

Pitch: 200nm

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Summary of general fabrication process

Liftoff

Direct etch

Electroplating…

or doping

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Chapter 1 Introduction and Historical Perspective

1. Introduction.
2. Growth of IC – Moore’s law.
3. Some history in IC industry.
4. Semiconductors.
5. Semiconductor devices, semiconductor technology families.

NE 343 Microfabrication and thin film technology

Instructor: Bo Cui, ECE, University of Waterloo

Textbook: Silicon VLSI Technology by Plummer, Deal and Griffin

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Pentium IV

1st electronic computer

ENIAC (1946)

Explosive growth of computing power

Macroelectronics Microelectronics Nanoelectronics

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2003

Itanium 2®

1971

4004 ®

2001

Pentium IV ®

1989

386 ®

2300

134 000

410M

42M

1991

486 ®

1.2M

transistor /chip

10 µm 1 µm 0.1 µm

transistor size

Human hair Red blood cell Bacteria Virus

Explosive growth of computing power

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Device scaling down over time in IC industry

Moore’s law: doubling of the number of transistors on a chip roughly every two years.

This is realized by:

Making transistor smaller - smallest lateral feature size decreases by 13% each year.

Making chip bigger – chip/wafer size increases 16%/year.

Gordon Moore:

born 3 January 1929, co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation; author of Moore's Law published in 1965.

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Cell dimensions

Atomic dimensions

Era of Simple Scaling

Scaling + Innovation

(ITRS)

Invention

Device scaling down over time in IC industry

• The era of “easy” scaling is over.
• We are now in a period where technology and device innovations are required.
• Beyond 2020, new currently unknown inventions will be required.

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Device scaling down over time in IC industry

SIA: Semiconductor Industry Association

NTRS: National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors.

ITRS: International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, http://www.itrs.net

Scaling down supply voltage because otherwise, as transistors get smaller, the electric fields (voltage/feature size) in these devices will increase to unacceptable levels.

In addition, the number of levels of interconnection and photo-mask also increases.

Each node half pitch ×(1/√2), area per transistor ×(1/2), i.e. for same chip size, # of transistors doubled

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NEC

Fabrication of truly tiny transistor

However, the key is how to fabricate them with high yield and low cost.

More importantly, even though it can be fabricated, it may not function the way we want (quantum effect, leak current…).

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Chapter 1 Introduction and Historical Perspective

1. Introduction.
2. Growth of IC – Moore’s law.
3. Some history in IC industry.
4. Semiconductors.
5. Semiconductor devices, semiconductor technology families.

NE 343 Microfabrication and thin film technology

Instructor: Bo Cui, ECE, University of Waterloo

Textbook: Silicon VLSI Technology by Plummer, Deal and Griffin

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• 1940s - setting the stage - the initial inventions that made integrated circuits possible.
• In 1945, Bell Labs established a group to develop a semiconductor replacement for the vacuum tube. The group led by William Shockley, included, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and others.
• In 1947 Bardeen and Brattain and Shockley succeeded in creating an amplifying circuit utilizing a point-contact "transfer resistance" device that later became known as a transistor.
• In 1951 Shockley developed the junction transistor, a more practical form of the transistor.
• By 1954 the transistor was an essential component of the telephone system and the transistor first appeared in hearing aids followed by radios.

IC fabrication technology: brief history

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W. Shockley

J. Bardeen

W. Brattain

1st transistor in 1947 by Bell Lab, it is a point contact transistor.

Some history in IC industry: first transistor

Bipolar transistor in polycrystalline Germanium, 1956 Nobel Prize in physics.

Base is n-type Ge.

Emitter and collector are two metal wires, which are very thin and pushed onto the Ge base.

Distance between the two metal wires: 200-250μm.

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First junction transistor

Gordon Teal and Morgan Sparks made the first junction transistor, the construction of which eliminated many of the reliability problems of the point contact transistors.

Grown junction transistor technology of the 1950s, in single crystalline Si or Ge.

For Si device, Al wire is used to connect to the middle P base region (it doesn’t matter if Al is also contacted to the N-regions due to the high contact resistance with N).

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Alloy junction technology of the 1950s

Indium melts at 157^oC, and it is a P-type dopant.

(In is in the same group as B, the most popular P-type dopant. B, Al, Ga, In…)

It is a very simple idea.

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Doubled diffused mesa transistor technology of the late1950s

Gas phase diffusion (e.g. PH₃ gas to dope with P) to dope the silicon.

Many devices could be produced from a single substrate.

But exposed junctions were present on the wafer surface or at wafer edges.

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Integrated Circuit (IC) invented by Kilby from TI

TI: Texas Instrument

Jack Kilby, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000

To read (if interested) “Turning Potential into Realities: The Invention of

the Integrated Circuit (Nobel Lecture)” http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/85010385/PDFSTART

IC: integrate multiple components on the same chip and to interconnect them to form a circuit.

A simple oscillator IC with five integrated

components (resistors, capacitors, distributed

capacitors and transistors) on Ge substrate.

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• Kilby's invention had a serious drawback, the individual circuit elements were connected together with gold wires making the circuit difficult to scale up to any complexity.
• By late 1958 Jean Hoerni at Fairchild had developed a structure with N and P junctions formed in silicon. Over the junctions a thin layer of silicon dioxide was used as an insulator and holes were etched open in the silicon dioxide to connect to the junctions.
• In 1959, Robert Noyce also of Fairchild had the idea to evaporate a thin metal layer over the circuits created by Hoerni's process.
• The metal layer connected down to the junctions through the holes in the silicon dioxide and was then etched into a pattern to interconnect the circuit.
• Planar technology set the stage for complex integrated circuits and is the process used today.

Planar technology

Planar process invented in the late 1950s

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Planar process invented in the late 1950s

• Gas phase diffusion masked by SiO₂.
• SiO₂ patterned by photolithography.
• Since only Si has this perfect oxide that can block the diffusion, technology was shifted from Ge to Si.
• Junction is under SiO₂ surface (no longer exposed to surface/edges), it is thus passivated/protected.

Jean Hoerni from Fairchild, inventor of planar process

Boron diffusion

Oxidation and drive-in diffusion

Phosphorus diffusion

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IC and basic photolithography process

The IC pattern is transferred from a mask to the silicon by printing it on the wafer using a light sensitive resist material.

Integrated circuit use photolithography and masking to fabricate multiple components in a common substrate.

Here are one bipolar transistor and two resistors.

Contact to collector

Emitter

Collector

Base

Resistor

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Schematic cross-section of a modern silicon IC. Here is a CMOS with an NMOS device on the right, and PMOS on the left. There are two levels of wiring shown.

Actual cross-section of a modern microprocessor chip.

Note the multiple levels of metal. The active parts of the transistors are barely visible at the bottom of the photography.

Modern integrated circuit

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• Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley, First Ge-based bipolar transistor invented 1947, Bell Labs. Nobel prize in 1956.
• Atalla, First Si-based MOSFET invented 1958, Bell Labs.
• Kilby (TI) & Noyce (Fairchild), Invention of integrated circuits 1959, Nobel prize in 2000.
• Planar technology, Jean Hoerni, Fairchild, 1959
• First CMOS circuit invented 1963, Fairchild
• “Moore’s law” coined 1965, Fairchild
• Dennard, scaling rule presented 1974, IBM
• First Si technology roadmap published 1994, USA

Breakthroughs in IC history (summary)

Intel was founded in 1968, by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, both from Fairchild.

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For Fairchild’s history, go to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor