説明
A feasibility study of rare earth oxides for replacing SiO2 gate oxide for CMOS integrated circuits has been conducted. Rare earth oxides have relatively higher dielectric constants and are suitable as gate dielectrics. Two-dimensional device simulations reveal that the desirable dielectric constant, without affecting the short-channel performance, is less than 50. The dielectric constant values of rare earth oxides satisfy this condition. One of the issues in rare earth oxides that needs to be addressed is the hygroscopic properties of the film. These physical and electrical changes in the oxides caused by this moisture absorption, which are not suitable in electronics applications, can be suppressed by coating a metal film or by using a passivation layer. Of all the rare earth oxides, it is found that La2O3, after a proper heat treatment, has the best electrical properties for gate insulator applications in MOSFETs, because of its higher barrier height for the conduction band electrons and valence band holes as well as its higher dielectric constant. The smallest gate leakage current demonstrated through experimental results was 3 x 10(-4)/cm(3) at 1V for an EOT of 0.6 nm. The conduction mechanism through La2O3 has been modeled, and has been shown to be mainly by SCLC. With post-metallization annealing (PMA) after A1 gate electrode formation, La2O3 gated MISFET has shown high effective electron mobility of 319 cm(2)/V s. This value is lower compared to SiO2, but still one of the highest among all the high-kappa MISFETs, for a gate oxide EOT value which is slightly larger than 2.3 nm. The PMA recovers the flat band shift and improves the mobility presumably by the diffusion of Al into La2O3 which compensates the positive charges in the film. However, the growth of an interfacial A1(2)O(3) layer, which results in air increase in EOT, is still a problem. The solution could be to replace the A1 gate electrode with a less reactive metal with La2O3, and doping La2O3 films with some elements which compensate the ...