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Comparative Study on Electrical and Microstructural Characteristics of ZrO2 and HfO2 Grown by Atomic Layer Deposition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2011

Hyoungsub Kim ,
Krishna C. Saraswat  and
Paul C. McIntyre
Hyoungsub Kim
Affiliation:
Department of Advanced Materials Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 440-746, Korea
Krishna C. Saraswat
Affiliation:
Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305
Paul C. McIntyre
Affiliation:
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305
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Abstract

Ultra-thin ZrO2 and HfO2 dielectric films grown by atomic layer deposition (ALD) are quite promising materials for gate dielectric applications in future transistors, and they exhibit significantly different as-grown microstructures: polycrystalline and amorphous phases, respectively. However, under the identical deposition conditions, both metal oxides show surprisingly similar capacitance–voltage (C–V) characteristics as a function of film thickness, implying that the identities and densities of fixed charge and bulk trapping charge are similar. Factors other than the film microstructure, such as concentration of impurities incorporated during the film deposition, are believed predominantly to control important C–V characteristics. Only the dielectric constant appears to depend significantly on the identity of the dielectric material. It is found that the dielectric constant of ALD-HfO2 (∼20) is significantly lower than that of ZrO2 (∼30) due to the differences in microstructure and also atomic density of the film. In terms of the leakage current characteristics, the effective potential barrier heights between Pt and these two dielectric films are identical (∼2.3 eV) within the experimental uncertainty. Implications for the electrode/dielectric interface electronic structure are discussed.

Keywords

Dielectric propertiesElectrical propertiesMicrostructure
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Materials Research , Volume 20 , Issue 11 , November 2005 , pp. 3125 - 3132
Copyright
Copyright © Materials Research Society 2005

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