Abstract
Interfacial layers formed by in-situ H2O and O2 plasma in an atomic layer deposition chamber on electrical and physical characteristics of high-k gated MOSFETs are investigated in this work. The dielectric constant of HfON gate dielectric can be up to 31 since more tetragonal HfO2 is obtained by H2O plasma formed interfacial layer (IL) with less oxygen. The effective oxide thickness is scaled down to 0.72 nm, and simultaneously the leakage current is about 6 × 10-3 A/cm2. A high on/off current ratio and low subthreshold swing are obtained thanks to good quality of H2O plasma formed IL. The H2O plasma formed IL is promising for high-k gated MOSFET.