An Emerging Local Annealing Method for Simultaneous Crystallization and Activation in Xtacking 3-D NAND Flash

The high thermal budget of three-dimensional NAND Flash (3D NAND Flash) is the key issue limiting the increase in vertical integration. The main purpose of this article is to design a local and high temperature annealing function to reduce the thermal budget and gain a high activation rate without diffusion at a target depth to improve the performance of 3D NAND Flash devices by laser annealing with green wavelength. The method of nanosecond pulse laser annealing (ns-PLA) for amorphous silicon (a-Si) crystallization and activation has been proven, and this method has the benefits of a low thermal budget and controllable heating. According to previous experiments, one of the important results is that ns-PLA with high energy can provide a high temperature that reaches the melting point of a-Si and obtain a deep and monocrystal-like silicon channel through liquid phase crystallization in 3D NAND applications and obtain a higher activation rate. These results cast emerging light on low thermal budget processes based on ns-PLA in 3D NAND flash for future architecture such as Xtacking architecture, and have significant ramifications for impurity activation rates and reducing channel leakages.