Improved Air Spacer Co-Integrated With Self-Aligned Contact (Sac) And Contact Over Active Gate (Coag) For Highly Scaled Cmos Technology

We report an improved air spacer that is successfully cointegrated on FinFET transistors with Self-Aligned Contacts (SAC) and Contacts Over Active Gate (COAG). The new integration scheme enables air spacer founation agnostic to the underlying transistor architecture, thus paving the way for a seamless adoption of air spacer in FinFET and Gate-All-Around (GAA) technologies. A reduction in effective capacitance (C-eff) by 15% is experimentally demonstrated. The power/performance benefits achieved by the new air spacer exceeds the benefits of scaling FinFET from 7nm node to 5nm node.