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Rapid thermal processing (RTP) is a semiconductor manufacturing process which heats silicon wafers to temperatures exceeding 1,000°C for not more than a few seconds. During cooling wafer temperatures must be brought down slowly to prevent dislocations and wafer breakage due to thermal shock.
Negative-bias temperature instability (NBTI) is a key reliability issue in MOSFETs, a type of transistor aging. NBTI manifests as an increase in the threshold voltage and consequent decrease in drain current and transconductance of a MOSFET. The degradation is often approximated by a power-law dependence on time.
The heat dissipation in integrated circuits problem has gained an increasing interest in recent years due to the miniaturization of semiconductor devices. The temperature increase becomes relevant for cases of relatively small-cross-sections wires, because such temperature increase may affect the normal behavior of semiconductor devices.
Furnace anneals may be integrated into other furnace processing steps, such as oxidations, or may be processed on their own. Furnace anneals are performed by equipment especially built to heat semiconductor wafers. Furnaces are capable of processing many wafers at a time, but each process can last between several hours and a day.
However, dry thermal oxidation processes require relatively high temperatures (>1000 °C) and, due to the low growth rate, long process times. To decrease both oxidation temperature and process time the dry oxidation process can be replaced by a wet oxidation followed by nitrogen annealing.
The term "hot electron" comes from the effective temperature term used when modelling carrier density (i.e., with a Fermi-Dirac function) and does not refer to the bulk temperature of the semiconductor (which can be physically cold, although the warmer it is, the higher the population of hot electrons it will contain all else being equal).
Junction temperature, short for transistor junction temperature, [1] is the highest operating temperature of the actual semiconductor in an electronic device. In operation, it is higher than case temperature and the temperature of the part's exterior.
The long time required to grow a thick oxide in dry oxidation makes this process impractical. Thick oxides are usually grown with a long wet oxidation bracketed by short dry ones (a dry-wet-dry cycle). The beginning and ending dry oxidations produce films of high-quality oxide at the outer and inner surfaces of the oxide layer, respectively.