Effects of remote-surface-roughness scattering on carrier mobility in field-effect-transistors with ultrathin gate dielectrics

Abstract

We examined effects of the remote surface roughness, which is the roughness between the polycrystalline silicon gate and gate dielectric, on the inversion carrier mobility of metal-insulator-semiconductor field-effect-transistors with ultrathin gate dielectrics. We calculated the effective mobility by the linear response theory and found that the scattering from the remote surface roughness reduces the effective mobility especially at high vertical fields. The effective mobility is severely reduced, if the correlation length of the remote surface roughness is comparable to the inverse of thermal de Broglie wave number. We show that the hole mobility reduction experimentally found for the transistor with the Al2O3 gate dielectric can be explained by this scattering.