Study of HfSiO film prepared by electron beam evaporation for high-k gate dielectric applications

The purpose of this paper is to report some experimental results with HfSiO films formed on silicon substrates by electron beam evaporation (EB-PVD) and annealed at different temperatures. The images of atomic force microscope (AFM) indicated that HfSiO film annealed at 900 8C was still amorphous, with a surface roughness of 0.173 nm. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis revealed that the chemical composition of the film was (HfO2)3(SiO2) and Hf–Si–O bonds existed in the annealed film. Electrical measurements showed that the equivalent oxide thickness (EOT) was 4 nm, the dielectric constant was around 6, the breakdown voltage was 10 MV/cm, the fixed charge density was 1.2 1012 cm 2, and the leakage current was 0.4 mA/cm2 at the gate bias of 2 V for 6 nm HfSiO film. The annealing after deposition effectively reduced trapping density and the leakage current, and eliminated hysteresis in the C–V curves. Annealing also induced SiO2 growth at the interface