Abstract
A new technique, namely the combination of a gate electrode deposited using amorphous-Si and a gate oxide grown in N 2 O is proposed and shown to improve the hot-electron hardness in metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) devices. It is found experimentally that MOS capacitors fabricated using this technique exhibit excellent charge-to-breakdown performance. The number of hot-electron-induced interface traps and the flat-band voltage shift are also reduced. The hardness improvement can be explained using a mechanism based on the increase in compressive stress in the oxide, the suppression of hydrogen effects, and the relaxation of SiO 2 /Si interfacial strain.