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Abstract:
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A silicon-on-insulator (SOI) transistor consists of a conventional silicon transistor which is built on the insulator instead of the silicon substrate. The buried insulator changes the properties of the transistor and this helps to overcome some new problems in the research field.- Integrated circuit manufacturers try to produce integrated circuits with smaller and smaller channel lengths. The problem is that processing, research and developement costs increase rapidly when the channel length is under 0.25 µm. Moreover the old models fail to predict the behaviour of the small transistors, because there are new effects called "short-channel effects" and a hot-electron degradiaton becomes notable. Silicon-on-insulator circuits are a major option to overcome these problems, because they are scalable in a deep-submicron region without any major investments and the SOI-processing is cheaper than the equalsize bulk silicon processing. SOI circuits have low power consumption and low supply voltages which are necessary in deep-submicron circuits. Other good properties are increased speed, high device density and a high temperature and radiation tolerance.- There are different types of SOI transistors. Two main categories are fully and partially depleted devices. The fully depleted devices have the most of the new good properties. Commercial devices exist which are a little better than similar bulk devices. The researchresults of thin film SOI transistors confirm that the SOI technology could be a major future technology. /Kir10 |