INFOS 2005

The 14th biennial Conference on Insulating Films on Semiconductors, INFOS 2005 was held in the attractive and historic university town of Leuven in Belgium from June 22 to June 24, 2005. The conference, organized by IMEC, Leuven, Belgium, and chaired by Guido Groeseneken from IMEC, took place in the new conference center of the Provinciehuis in Leuven, and continued the series of high-level INFOS conferences started in Durham, UK in 1979. Previous versions took place in Barcelona, Spain (2003) and Udine, Italy (2001). The conference was attended by about 157 people from 21 countries worldwide and was sponsored by IEEE, EDS, ECS and IMEC, and by Philips, ST Microelectronics, Aixtron, Tokyo Electron (TEL) and Keithley.

The conference presented the current status of dielectrics, semiconductor/insulator interfaces, and the physics and technology of MOS devices and brought together scientists and engineers oriented to materials, devices and applications. Out of the all-time record of 209 abstract submissions from 33 different countries-about 27% higher then the previous record achieved in INFOS 1995-the Technical Program Committee selected 53 papers for oral and 27 papers for poster presentation. Together with 17 invited papers from both academia and industry this brought the total number of papers at the conference to 97, coming from 20 different countries. These papers were presented in 4 plenary sessions, 7 x 2 parallel sessions, and 4 plenary poster introduction sessions. The posters were moreover intensively discussed during a "Belgian beer" evening reception on the first day of the conference. With 27 student papers out of the total of 80 accepted contributed papers the conference showed a strong involvement of academic research.

The papers covered the areas of physics, technology, characterization and modeling of dielectrics, interfaces, devices and applications. In view of the need to scale CMOS technologies beyond the 45 nm technology node, a large part of the conference was devoted to the important recent developments in the field of high-k/metal gate devices, which was also introduced by the opening plenary speaker Robert Chau from Intel. As a result, several invited talks and sessions were dedicated to various aspects of high-k/metal gate devices, technologies, materials and characterisation. Beside that, other invited talks and sessions were covering topics such as Germanium devices, dielectrics for compound semiconductors, SOI and non-volatile memory devices, FERAM and DRAM dielectrics, low-k dielectrics, multiple gate devices, dielectrics for organic devices, dielectric reliability and defect modeling, semiconductor and insulator nanostructures, and, last but not least, also the "good old" SiO₂-based dielectrics.

All papers of the conference were published in a special issue of Microelectronic Engineering, printed by Elsevier, which was available at the start of the conference. There are still copies of the proceedings and the CDROM with the papers available.

As part of the conference there were also a number of social events. On Wednesday evening there was a poster reception where the attendants could taste several kinds of Belgian beers, which stimulated very much the discussions at the posters. On Thursday afternoon there was a well-received excursion to Antwerp where the attendants had a guided tour to the Rubenshouse, the beautiful 17th century private home of the famous Flemish painter Pieter Paul Rubens, where he lived and also worked. This visit was followed by the conference banquet dinner in the Horta, which is a place built in Art Nouveau style, reconstructed from the remainders of the old Maison du Peuple in Brussels from the famous Belgian Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta.

For the first time at the conference also a Best Student Paper Award was granted in order to encourage student participation to the conference. At the end of the conference it was announced that the Best Student Paper was granted to L. Thevenod for his paper "Influence of TiN Metal Gate on Si/SiO₂ surface roughness in N and PMOSFET's".

The program of this INFOS conference has been put together by the Technical Program Committee. We would like to thank all the members of this committee for their expertise and their time made available for the selection of the contributions and for the critical reviewing of the final papers in these Proceedings. We are also grateful to the members of the Steering Committee for their guidance, feedback and suggestions during the preparation of the conference. The contributions and the invaluable assistance from the Local Organizing Committee, from the conference secretary, Mrs. Veerle Vranckx, and from the professional conference organizer Momentum in the practical and logistic aspects of the conference are gratefully acknowledged. Finally we would like to thank the sponsors. Their support alleviated the pressure on the conference budget and allowed us to offer significantly reduced registration fees to encourage student participation.