Abstract
Metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitors with crystalline-TiO 2 /SiO 2 stacked dielectric are explored in this letter. The crystalline TiO 2 possesses a high permittivity while the SiO 2 provides a negative quadratic voltage coefficient of capacitance (VCC-α) to cancel out the positive VCC-α from the crystalline TiO 2 . These desirable properties render MIM capacitors with high performance in terms of a capacitance density of 11.9 fF/μm 2 with a VCC-α of 90 ppm/V 2 . With additional N 2 plasma treatment on the crystalline TiO 2 , because of the effective passivation of grain-boundary-related defects and, consequently, a lower leakage current by a factor of 50, the VCC-α can be further lowered to 30 ppm/V 2 with slight degradation in capacitance density to 11.2 fF/μm 2 , which well meets the requirement in 2018 set by ITRS. © 2011 IEEE.