Modulation of Schottky barrier at metal/Ge contacts by phosphoric acid coating and excimer laser annealing

Abstract

Germanium is an attractive material for advanced devices such as high speed transistors and high efficiency optical devices. To realize the high performance operation, low resistive contacts to Ge are required. However, the Fermi level in Ge at metal/Ge contacts is often pinned near the valance band edge. This Fermi level pinning generates high Schottky barrier heights at metal/Ge contacts regardless the work function of the metals, which results in low resistive contacts to p-type Ge but high resistive contacts to n-type Ge. Thus, a technique for modulating the Schottky barrier heights at metal/Ge contacts is desired. For this purpose, effects of surface treatments of Ge using phosphoric acid coating and excimer laser annealing (LA) were investigated. After LA without phosphoric acid coating, the reverse current of the Al/n-type Ge contacts is increased by an order of magnitude. On the other hand, the reverse current is significantly increased by three orders of magnitude after LA with phosphoric acid coating. Here, the Schottky barrier heights are decreased from 0.56 to 0.50 eV and from 0.59 to 0.49 eV after LA for samples without and with phosphoric acid coating, respectively. These phenomena are attributed to formation of very thin GeOx surface layers and very shallow doped layers having very high P concentrations, respectively. This technique is useful for modulation of the Fermi level pinning for metal/Ge contacts with the low thermal budget.