Silicon nitride offers many potential benefits to the family of buried contact fabrication sequences including improved design flexibility and efficiency. The main device structures of the buried contact family comprise the standard buried contact, the simplified buried contact and the double-sided buried contact cells. The physical properties of silicon nitride allow it to be used for surface passivation, as an anti-reflection coating, as a diffusion source material and as a masking dielectric. The use of silicon nitride in each buried contact fabrication sequence is described in this work. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.