Abstract
Metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) capacitors that incorporate HfO2 with physical thickness of 14.0 nm gate dielectrics were fabricated by RF magnetron sputtering. The show that the dominant mechanisms are Schottky emission at high temperatures (>498 K) in low electric fields (<1 MV/cm). The dynamic dielectric constant (□r) is close to 3.57 from the slope of Schottky plots. The extracted Al/HfO2 barrier-height and effective electronic mass in HfO2 films are about 1.03 eV and 0.9 m0. The study shows the area scaling and the voltage dependence of the time to breakdown TBD. The fraction of breakdown devices F is plotted on a Weibull scale. The Weibull fit of our data shows clearly that TBD scales with area, meaning that the breakdown sites are randomly distributed. The Weibull slope β of the breakdown for both the area dependence and the time to dielectric breakdown distribution was found to be β = 2.5. Estimated ten year lifetime has been projected to be -2.24 V.