Abstract
For the first time, we have investigated the effect of ozone (O 3) pre-treatment on the Bias Temperature Instability (BTI) characteristics of high-k gate dielectrics. We found mat O 3 pre-treatment improved NBTI and electrical characteristics of HfAlON gate dielectric. We suggest that O 3 pre-treatment effectively suppress the incorporation of the impurities (such as nitrogen (N), hydrogen (H) and water related species), resulting in the improvement of NBTI characteristics (-2.32V operating voltage for 10 years lifetime). For the PBTI characteristics, the high-k gate dielectric with poly-Si gate electrode was severely degraded We suggest that dopants (such as arsenic (As) and phosphorus (P)) in the gate electrode of nMOSFETs diffuse into the gate dielectrics, causing the severe degradation of PBTI characteristics (∼1.1V operating voltage for 10 years lifetime). We believe that the optimization in the high-k gate stack can improve the PBTI characteristics by suppressing the dopants incorporation.
| Original language | English |
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| Pages (from-to) | 943-946 |
| Number of pages | 4 |
| Journal | Technical Digest - International Electron Devices Meeting, IEDM |
| State | Published - 2003 |
| Event | IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting - Washington, DC, United States Duration: 8 Dec 2003 → 10 Dec 2003 |