Impact of SiN on performance in novel complementary metal-oxide- semiconductor architecture using substrate strained-SiGe and mechanical strained-Si technology

In this paper, we report the fabrication of a SiN-induced mechanically tensile-strained Si n-type metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (nMOSFET) and a compressively strained SiGe p-type MOSFET to improve the drive current of both n-and pMOSFETs simultaneously, and we integrated both devices on the same wafer. Individual MOSFET performance can be adjusted independently to their optimum levels due to the separation process for two types of devices. It is found that n- and pMOSFETs in the novel complementary metal-oxide- semiconductor (CMOS) architecture had a better performance, not only a higher drain-to-source saturation current but also a higher transconductance with wide gate voltage swing, than the Si devices used as a control. Although a degraded performance was found in the pMOSFET with a SiN layer, this effect can be minimized by increasing the Ge content in the Si_1-xGe_x conducting channel, thus demonstrating that the flow has a great flexibility for developing a next-generation high-performance CMOS devices.