The Effects of Corner Transistors in STI-isolated SOI MOSFETs

In this work, the effects of corner transistors in SOI MOSFETs were investigated. We fabricated SOI MOSFETs with various widths and a fixed length and characterized them. The SOI thickness was $4000{\AA}$ and the buried oxide(BOX) thickness was $4000{\AA}$. The isolation of active region was simply done by silicon etching and TEOS sidewall formation. Several undesirable characteristics have been reported for LOCOS isolation in fabrication on SOI wafers so far. Although we used an STI-like process instead of LOCOS, there were still a couple of abnormal phenomena such as kinks and double humps in drain current. Above all, we investigated the location of the parasitic transistors and found that they were at the corners of the SOI in width direction by high-resolution SEM inspection. It turned out that their characteristics are strongly dependent on the channel width. We made a contact pad through which we can control the body potential and figured out the dependency of operation on the body potential. The double humps became more prominent as the body bias went more negative until the full depletion of the channel where the threshold voltage shift did not occur any more. Through these works, we could get insights on the process that can reduce the effects of corner transistors in SOI MOSFETs, and several possible solutions are suggested at the end.