Plasma treatment effects on Si and Si/dielectric film heterostructures

"A multi-step plasma procedure for the fabrication of high-quality SiO2/Si interfaces and the functionalization of silicon dioxide surfaces has been developed for microelectronic manufacturing industry. The substrate activation based on a plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) has been developed in order to obtain high quality SiO2/Si heterostructures. The SiO2 films have been then exposed to additional PECVD processes in order to modify the dielectric surface by polar groups. The advantage of this method consists in the possibility of activating the substrate, depositing and functionalizing high-quality SiO2 films in a single run process, at low temperature, and by means of the same equipment. The reported method has also been exploited to produce device-quality silicon nitride/silicon heterostructures; preliminary results are shown. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved."