Abstract
In this work, the inductively coupled plasma etching technique was applied to etch the barium titanate thin film. A comparative study of etch characteristics of the barium titanate thin film has been investigated in fluorine-based (CF4/O2, C4F8/O2 and SF6/O2) plasmas. The etch rates were measured using focused ion beam in order to ensure the accuracy of measurement. The surface morphology of etched barium titanate thin film was characterized by atomic force microscope. The chemical state of the etched surfaces was investigated by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. According to the experimental result, we monitored that a higher barium titanate thin film etch rate was achieved with SF6/O2 due to minimum amount of necessary ion energy and its higher volatility of etching byproducts as compared with CF4/O2 and C4F8/O2. Low-volatile C-F compound etching byproducts from C4F8/O2 were observed on the etched surface and resulted in the reduction of etch rate. As a result, the barium titanate films can be effectively etched by the plasma with the composition of SF6/O2, which has an etch rate of over than 46.7 nm/min at RF power/inductively coupled plasma (ICP) power of 150/1,000 W under gas pressure of 7.5 mTorr with a better surface morphology.
Highlights
Gate insulator materials of downscaling MOSFET devices and insulator materials for metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitor have become key issues in semiconductor memory application field
The BaTiO3 thin films were deposited by the aerosol deposition (AD) process [15]
Experimental results indicate that a higher BaTiO3 thin film etch rates were achieved with SF6/O2 plasmas
Summary
Gate insulator materials of downscaling MOSFET devices and insulator materials for metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitor have become key issues in semiconductor memory application field. The existence of gate dielectric suffers from increased gate leakage [1], and the insulator of MIM cannot meet the requirement of high capacitance density and low leakage current [2,3,4] To solve these challenges, high-k materials are needed for gate insulator and insulator of MIM capacitor. High-k materials including TiO2, TiN, HfAlO3, BaSeTiO3 and BaTiO3 have been widely studied [5,6,7,8,9]. Among these materials, BaTiO3 is emerging as a promising material due to the merits of high dielectric constant, low leakage current and excellent piezoelectric and ferroelectric properties [10,11,12]. Using BaTiO3 thin film as the gate insulator and insulator of MIM capacitor can greatly improve the performance
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