US Patent 10304936 Protection of high-K dielectric during reliability anneal on nanosheet structures

A starting structure for forming a gate-all-around field effect transistor (FET) and a method of fabricating the gate-all-around FET. The method includes forming a stack of silicon nanosheets above a substrateforming an interfacial layer over the nanosheets depositing a high-k dielectric layer conformally on the interfacial layer. The method also includes depositing a layer of silicon nitride (SiN) above the high-k dielectric layer and performing reliability anneal after depositing the layer of SiN to crystallize the high-k dielectric layer.