A Low-Power HKMG CMOS Platform Compatible With Dram Node 2× and Beyond.

In this paper, a low-cost and low-leakage gate-first high- \(k\) metal-gate CMOS integration compatible with the high thermal budget used in a 2× node dynamic random access memory process flow is reported. The metal inserted polysilicon stack is based on HfO2 coupled with Al2O3 capping for pMOS devices, and with a TiN/Mg/TiN stack together with As ion implantation for nMOS. It is demonstrated that n and pMOS performance of 400 and 200 \(\mu \) A/ \(\mu \) m can be obtained for an OFF-state current of \(10^{-10}\) A/ \(\mu \) m, while maintaining gate and junction leakages compatible with low-power applications. Reliability and matching properties are aligned with logic gate-stacks, and the proposed solution is outperforming the La-cap-based solutions in terms of thermal stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]