Creating process margin in laser thermal processing: Application to formation of titanium silicide

Recently, we have demonstrated that, due to differential thermal budget, laser silicidation is an attractive alternative for deep submicron metal-oxide field effect transistors. In laser thermal processing, any spatial beam nonuniformities or pulse to pulse energy fluctuations lead to varying Si melt depth and hence variations in the silicide depth. In this letter, we report that amorphization is a possible solution for this problem. We demonstrate that stochiometric titanium disilicide can be fabricated using laser thermal processing. We also show that the depth of the silicide can be defined by amorphization and that process margin can be created in laser thermal processing. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.