Effects of Annealing on Ferroelectric Hafnium–Zirconium–Oxide-Based Transistor Technology

Abstract

In this letter, we investigate annealing effects in ferroelectric HfZrO <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>x</i></sub> dielectric in metal–insulator–metal devices and metal–oxide–semiconductor capacitors by comparing two annealing methods: rapid thermal annealing (RTA) and microwave annealing (MWA). The tradeoff characteristics between the annealing conditions, polarization–electric field characteristics, gate leakage current, and interface state density ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${D} _{\textsf {it}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) are discussed. We show that: 1) a positive correlation between the remanent polarization (Pr), the gate leakage current, and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${D}_{\textsf {it}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> as the annealing temperature (RTA) and the annealing power (MWA) increase and 2) the MWA is promising for ferroelectric transistors technology, since its low thermal budget can minimize <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${D}_{\textsf {it}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and avoid increase in the gate leakage current.