Research Projects
Research Update
New Effect:
10,000-100,000 Times Reduction of Gate Leakage Current of Silicon
Oxide/Oxynitride
We discovered and
harnessed a new effect, phonon-energy
coupling enhancement (PECE)—an
increase in bond energy coupling through the manipulation of silicon,
oxygen, and deuterium vibrational modes undergoing rapid thermal
process (RTP) and deuterium anneal, so that Si-O and Si-D bonds become
more robust. This results in dramatical reduction of gate leakage
current of silicon oxides and oxynitrides by 4-5orders
of magnitude, equivalent to that of high-k gate
oxides. This will allow chip producers to develop faster chips with
reduced power consumption by extending the current mainstream silicon
oxide/oxynitride technology. [2005 International
Semiconductor Device
Research Symposium (ISDRS),
IEEE, Dec. 7-9, 2005. (PDF) and Appl. Phys. Lett. vol.
88, no. 8, 082905, Feb.
20, 2006. (PDF)]
We found that the origin of the H/D isotope effect is the
energy coupling
from the Si-D bending mode to two vibrational modes, i.e. Si-O TO mode
and the Si-Si TO phonon mode (Appl. Phys. Lett. vol. 83, no. 11,
2151-2153, Sept. 15, 2003). We were the first to find the
energy coupling to
Si-O mode, which might open a new pathway for further improvement of
the
hot-electron related MOS transistor lifetime.
Traditionally carbon nanotubes were manipulated by STM and
AFM with
very low yield. We successfully demonstrated the alignment of a
single
bundle of single-wall nanotubes across two electrodes using AC electric
field (J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B,
vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 776-780, 2004). This may pave the way for
manipulation of nanotubes with high yield.
In 2003, we have received three research grants
from
National Science Foundation Nanoscale Exploratory Research (NER)
program, Nanoscale Undergraduate Education (NUE), and Department of
Energy
EPSCoR program.
In 2004, we have received two new research grants
from Department of Energy and Army Research Laboratory.
In 2005, as Principal Investigator, Dr. Chen received $2.8M
from NSF and Kentucky State EPSCoR
Infrastructure Program.
In 2006, as Principal Investigator, Dr. Chen received $1.2M
from NSF Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) program.
|
