Structural and electrical characteristics of RF-sputtered HfO2 high-k based MOS capacitors

TLDR: In this paper, the HfO 2 high-k thin films have been deposited on p-type silicon wafer using RF magnetron sputtering technique and the XRD, AFM and Ellipsometric characterizations have been performed for crystal structure, surface morphology and thickness measurements respectively.

Abstract: The HfO 2 high-k thin films have been deposited on p-type (1 0 0) silicon wafer using RF magnetron sputtering technique. The XRD, AFM and Ellipsometric characterizations have been performed for crystal structure, surface morphology and thickness measurements respectively. The monoclinic structured, smooth surface HfO 2 thin films with 9.45 nm thickness have been used for Al/HfO 2 /p-Si metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) structures fabrication. The fabricated Al/HfO2/Si structure have been used for extracting electrical properties viz dielectric constant, EOT, barrier height, doping concentration and interface trap density through capacitance voltage and current–voltage measurements. The dielectric constant, EOT, barrier height, effective charge carriers, interface trap density and leakage current density are determined are 22.47, 1.64 nm, 1.28 eV, 0.93 × 10 10 , 9.25 × 10 11  cm −2  eV −1 and 9.12 × 10 −6  A/cm 2 respectively for annealed HfO 2 thin films.