Low temperature atomic hydrogen annealing of InGaAs MOSFETs

Recent work showing a strong quality improvement of the Si/SiO₂ material system by low temperature atomic hydrogen annealing (AHA), and the fact that III-V semiconductors outperform Si in many applications makes the investigation of AHA on III-V/high-k interfaces to a very interesting topic. In this work, the potential of AHA as a low temperature annealing treatment of InGaAs metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors is presented and compared to conventional annealing in a rapid thermal process (RTP) system using forming gas. It is found that post metal annealing in atomic hydrogen greatly enhances the quality of the metal-oxide-semiconductor structure in terms of effective mobility, minimum subthreshold swing, and reliability. The device performance is comparable to RTP annealing but can be performed at a lower temperature, which opens up for integration of more temperature-sensitive materials in the device stack.