We present the effects of N2O plasma treatment for hot carrier reliability and gate oxide stability in excimer-laser annealed poly-Si TFTs. N2O plasma treatment between SiO2 and poly-Si suppresses both the reduction in mobility caused by hot carrier stress and the Vth shift caused by gate bias stress. The results of XPS spectra and the energy distribution of the trap state density of stressed TFTs show that the introduction of Si-N bonds plays an important role in poly-Si TFT reliability.

Drivability-improved MOSFETs were successfully fabricated by using nano-grating silicon wafers. There was almost no additional process change in device fabrication when the height of the gratings was less than the conventional macroscopic wafer surface roughness. The MOSFETs with the grating height of 35 nm showed 21% improvement in current drivability compared to the conventional one with the same device occupancy area. And the roll-off characteristic of threshold voltage of nano-grating device held the line of conventional one in despite of the 3-D channel structure. The technology provides great advantages for drivability improvement without paying much tradeoff of process cost. This proposal will be useful to CMOS-LSIs with high performance in general.