Effective methods of gettering metallic impurities were proposed. To achieve effective gettering, an annealing process to induce gettering was modified taking fundamental gettering steps and the difference in the gettering mechanism into account. As the concentration of heavy metal is below solubility in a state-of-the-art clean room, a combination of segregation type gettering and slow cooling heat treatment is an effective technique to remove metal impurities from the device active region. Using this technique, DRAM device characteristics such as leakage current and data retention time can be improved.