Amorphous morphology, thermal stability and electronic structure of non-crystalline transition-metal elemental and binary oxides, and chalcogenides

The primary motivation for this research is to identify alternative high-k gate dielectrics for advanced crystalline Si complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) devices. A novel and systematic approach to the classification of candidate elemental and binary non-crystalline oxides that is based on relative bond ionicity separates these dielectrics into three groups with different amorphous morphologies: continuous random networks, modified continuous random networks in which metal atoms disrupt and modify the covalently bonded network structure, and random close packed ionic structures. This approach identifies the importance of the oxygen atom co-ordination, providing useful insights into the bonding in chalcogenide alloys as well.