Abstract
Transmission electron microscopy has been applied to study oxidation kinetics of CoSi 2 on silicon for both dry and wet oxidation. Care was taken to determine the activation energies of oxidation in the temperature and time regime where the islanding of CoSi 2 does not occur. For dry oxidation, activation energies for parabolic and linear growth were found to be 1.91 and 2.01 eV (±0.1 eV), respectively. For wet oxidation, activation energies for parabolic and linear growth were found to be 1.75 and 1.68 eV (±0.1 eV), respectively. The activation energy of the parabolic rate constant is substantially different from those obtained previously. The difference is attributed to the occurrence of islanding during oxidation in the previous study. A comparison of oxidation kinetics of CoSi 2 , NiSi 2 , TiSi 2 on silicon with pure silicon substrates indicated that the oxidation kinetics are practically the same for CoSi 2 and NiSi 2 in the parabolic growth regime, but substantially different from those of TiSi 2 on silicon and pure silicon. The similarity in oxidation kinetics of cubic CaF 2 structure CoSi 2 and NiSi 2 on silicon with small mismatches to silicon is correlated to essentially the same stress level in these two silicides during the oxidation.