Strained Silicon Directly on Insulator (SSOI): Biaxial, Uniaxial, or Hybrid Strain?

This paper reviews the development of uniaxial and biaxial strain silicon technologies and how they may be combined through strain engineering of SSOI substrates. Through a novel method of selective biaxial-uniaxial strain hybridization, this work demonstrates a scalable enhanced SSOI CMOS technology. With this mixed-strain approach, nFET uniaxial strain can be amplified by the substrate strain platform while SSOI pFETs can be enhanced beyond conventional single unaxially-strained or biaxially-strained Si. This can be accomplished with minimal process complexity cost.