Tight-binding Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Silicon Plasma Oxidation

Abstract

According to the recently fabricated silicon device technology, the thickness of gate oxide has become only a few nanometers. So the effect of device characteristics resulted from the flatness of SiO₂/Si interface and the bonding state of the transition region can not be neglected. Recently total low-temperature process is taken into account in order to avoid the mechanical stress caused by thermal-expansion-coefficient difference of Si, SiO₂ and interconnected metals. Plasma oxidation is a technique being used for growing insulator films on semiconductor surfaces at lower temperatures than those used for thermal oxidation. On the other hand, computational chemistry has become a powerful tool to obtain useful information that can not be provided by the experiments. In this study, we performed plasma oxidation simulation using tight-binding molecular dynamics, the oxygen species are emitted over the substrate and the structure of constructed SiO₂ film was discussed.