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Electrical Properties

  • Chapter
Polycrystalline Silicon for Integrated Circuits and Displays

Abstract

Polycrystalline-silicon films formed by chemical vapor deposition are used in a wide variety of ULSI applications requiring very different electrical properties. High-value load resistors for static random-access-memory (RAM) cells utilize the high resistance of lightly doped polysilicon to provide a convenient and stable resistor that limits the current flowing in the cell. At the other extreme, the excellent technological compatibility of polysilicon with high-temperature, integrated-circuit processing allows straightforward fabrication of self-aligned gates and convenient interconnections in ULSI circuits. Although a resistivity of less than about 10-3 Ω-cm — eight orders of magnitude less than for static RAM load resistors — is routinely achieved, the lower bound on the resistivity of polysilicon can limit the performance of silicon-gate integrated circuits that use polysilicon interconnections to conduct signals long distances across a chip [5.1]. As feature sizes become smaller and intrinsic transistor delays decrease on chips of increasing overall dimensions, the resistance of polysilicon interconnections is becoming a more serious limitation on integrated-circuit performance.

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  1. Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, USA

    Ted Kamins

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Kamins, T. (1998). Electrical Properties. In: Polycrystalline Silicon for Integrated Circuits and Displays. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5577-3_5

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