Characterization and prevention of humidity related degradation of atomic layer deposited Al2O3

Abstract

Atomic layer deposited aluminum oxide (ALD-Al2O3) is a dielectric material, which is widely used in organic light emitting diodes in order to prevent their organic layers from humidity related degradation. Unfortunately, there are strong hints that in some cases, ALD-Al2O3 itself is suffering from humidity related degradation. Especially, high temperature and high humidity seem to enhance ALD-Al2O3 degradation strongly. For this reason, the degradation behavior of ALD-Al2O3 films at high temperature and high humidity was investigated in detail and a way to prevent it from degradation was searched. The degradation behavior is analyzed in the first part of this paper. Using infrared absorbance measurements and X-ray diffraction, boehmite (γ-AlOOH) was identified as a degradation product. In the second part of the paper, it is shown that ALD-Al2O3 films can be effectively protected from degradation using a silicon oxide capping. The deposition of very small amounts of silicon in a molecular beam epitaxy system and an X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy investigation of the chemical bonding between the silicon and the ALD-Al2O3 surface led to the conclusion that a silicon termination of the ALD-Al2O3 surface (Al*-O-SiOx) is able to stop humidity related degradation of the underlying ALD-Al2O3 films. The third part of the paper shows that the protection mechanism of the silicon termination is probably due to the strong tendency of silicic acid to resilificate exposed ALD-Al2O3 surfaces. The protective effect of a simple silicon source on an ALD-Al2O3 surface is shown exemplary and the related chemical reactions are presented.