A NEW SELF-ALIGNED PLANAR OXIDATION TECHNOLOGY

This paper presents a new self-aligned planar oxidation technology (SPOT) developed as an isolation process for obtaining highly uniform planar surfaces in very-high-speed biopolar LSI's. In the SPOT isolation process, low temperature (900 degree C) high pressure (0. 8 MPa) oxidation is used. Planarity is found to be independent of the selective oxidation temperature and oxide thickness. Furthermore, no dislocation is generated in this process. A low leakage current vs. high voltage breakdown characteristic is obtained between isolated islands. The results confirm SPOT to be very effective for low temperature isolation indispensable to realizing very-high-speed bipolar large scale integrated circuits (LSI's).