A study on electrical and material characteristics of hafnium oxide with silicon interface passivation on III-V substrate for future scaled CMOS technology

The continuous improvement in the semiconductor industry has been successfully achieved by the reducing dimensions of CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology. For the last four decades, the scaling down of physical thickness of SiO₂ gate dielectrics has improved the speed of output drive current by shrinking of transistor area in front-end-process of integrated circuits. A higher number of transistors on chip resulting in faster speed and lower cost can be allowable by the scaling down and these fruitful achievements have been mainly made by the thinning thickness of one key component - Gate Dielectric - at Si based MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistor) devices. So far, SiO₂ (silicon dioxide) gate dielectric having the excellent material and electrical properties such as good interface (i.e., Dit ~ 2x10¹⁰ eV⁻¹cm⁻²), low gate leakage current, higher dielectric breakdown immunity (≥10MV/cm) and excellent thermal stability at typical Si processing temperature has been popularly used as the leading gate oxide material. The next generation Si based MOSFETs will require more aggressive gate oxide scaling to meet the required specifications. Since high-k dielectrics provide the same capacitance with a thicker film, the leakage current reduction, therefore, less the standby power consumption is one of the huge advantages. Also, it is easier to fabricate during the process because the control of film thickness is still not in the critical range compared to the same leakage current characteristic of SiO₂ film. HfO₂ based gate dielectric is considered as the most promising candidate among materials being studied since it shows good characteristics with conventional Si technology and good device performance has been reported. However, it has still many problems like insufficient thermals stability on silicon such as low crystallization temperature, low k interfacial regrowth, charge trapping and so on. The integration of hafnium based high-k dielectric into CMOS technology is also limited by major issues such as degraded channel mobility and charge trapping. One approach to overcome these obstacles is using alternative substrate materials such as SiGe, GaAs, InGaAs, and InP to improve channel mobility.