Characteristics and Reliability of Hafnium Oxide Dielectric Stacks With Room Temperature Grown Interfacial Anodic Oxide

Abstract

Hafnium oxide dielectric stacks with anodic oxide interfacial layer (ANO-IL) were investigated under low-temperature consideration. A tilted-substrate sputtering technique, which provides various film thicknesses in one processing step, was proposed and useful for the characterization of charge distribution. It was found that charges existed in the HfO <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> /ANO-IL were smaller than that in HfO <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> /rapid-thermal-oxidation IL. The prepared samples exhibit good electrical characteristics, including small electrical hysteresis (< 10 mV), low leakage current, high effective dielectric breakdown field of 12.7 MV/cm, and maximum operating voltages of -2.74 V at 25degC and -2.32 V at 125degC for EOT = 2.3 nm stacks under a ten-year lifetime evaluation. The results suggest that the quality of IL in the dielectric stack is a critical reliability issue and that ANO is provided as a candidate for IL consideration of low-temperature dielectric stacks.