The poor endurance of the ferroelectric (FE) HfO2 (Fe-HfO2) material-based FE field-effect transistor (Fe-FET) remains a major challenge for its future commercial production. Here we propose high-? interface seed layer (SL) in metal-FE-insulator-semiconductor (MFIS) gate stack to address this issue. We fabricated Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 (HZO) thin films on various dielectric SLs, including ZrO2, HfO2, (Hf...

Hafnium oxide (HfO2) thin films have attracted much attention owing to their usefulness in equivalent oxide thickness scaling in microelectronics, which arises from their high dielectric constant and thermodynamic stability with silicon. However, the surface passivation properties of such films, particularly on crystalline silicon (c-Si), have rarely been reported upon. In this study, the HfO2 ...

Metal–insulator–metal (MIM) capacitors have been fabricated using high-κ La2O3\HfO2 dielectric stacks deposited using Dense Plasma Focus (DPF) and were subsequently studied. DPF is a unique machine used for the very first time to fabricate dielectric stacks within a MIM structure as it can be used both to deposit nano-size thin film as well as can also be used to change the properties of the po...

Crystalline structures, zone-center phonon modes, and the related dielectric response of the three lowpressure phases of HfO2 have been investigated in density-functional theory using ultrasoft pseudopotentials and a plane-wave basis. The structures of low-pressure HfO2 polymorphs are carefully studied with both the local-density approximation ~LDA! and the generalized gradient approximation. T...

The mechanical properties of sputter-deposited HfO2 and HfxSi1-xO2 films were studied as a function of composition using nanoindentation. The elastic modulus and hardness were measured at room temperature for as-deposited films of varying Hf content and for films subjected to annealing at 1000 C. The elastic modulus and hardness of as-deposited films were found to increase monotonically with in...

We report on the thermal decomposition of uncapped, ultrathin HfO2 films grown by chemical vapor deposition on SiO2 /Si(100) substrates. Medium energy ion scattering, x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy were used to examine the films after they had been annealed in vacuum to 900–1050 °C. Film decomposition is a strong function of the HfO2 o...

A nitridation treatment technology with a urea/ammonia complex nitrogen source improved resistive switching property in HfO2-based resistive random access memory (RRAM). The nitridation treatment produced a high performance and reliable device which results in superior endurance (more than 109 cycles) and a self-compliance effect. Thus, the current conduction mechanism changed due to defect pas...

A hot wall Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) flow reactor equipped with a Quartz Crystal Microbalance (QCM) has been used for the deposition of HfO2 thin films with tetrakis (dimethylamino) hafnium (TDMAH) and H2O as precursors. HfO2 films were deposited on Hterminated Si and SC1 chemical oxide starting surfaces. Spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE) and QCM measurements confirm linear growth of the film...

To minimize leakage currents resulting from the thinning of the insulator in the gate stack of field effect transistors, high-dielectric constant high-k metal oxides, and HfO2 in particular, are being implemented as a replacement for SiO2. To speed the rate of processing, it is desirable to etch the gate stack e.g., metal gate, antireflection layers, and dielectric in a single process while hav...