Noise properties of the leakage current conduction in a ZrO2 thin film

Abstract

In this paper, we report the leakage current conduction in a metal-oxide-semiconductor structure with a ZrO2 gate dielectric and its current noise properties. The characteristics of the leakage current in ZrO2 suggest that the leakage is caused by the trap-assisted tunneling in the low-bias region while space-charge-limited conduction is involved in the high-bias region. Lorentzian features disappear and the 1/f noise due to the carrier number fluctuation becomes dominant as the bias voltage is increased. The correlation of the Lorentzian feature in the current noise power spectrum with the time domain random telegraph signal fluctuation supports the trap-mediated carrier conduction mechanism. The transition from trap-assisted conduction to space-charge-limited conduction is discussed in terms of the noise response.