Soft breakdown in MgO dielectric layers

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Date
2009-07-24
Authors
Miranda, Enrique
O'Connor, Éamon
Hughes, Gregory
Casey, P.
Cherkaoui, Karim
Monaghan, Scott
Long, Rathnait D.
O'Connell, Dan
Hurley, Paul K.
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Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
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Abstract
In this work, we report on the occurrence of the soft breakdown (SBD) failure mode in 20 nm-thick films of magnesium oxide (MgO) grown on Si substrates. To our knowledge, this is the first observation of this failure mechanism in a high-kappa gate dielectric with such a large oxide thickness. We show that the I-V characteristics follow the power-law dependence typical of SBD conduction in a wider voltage range than that reported for SiO 2 . We pay special attention to the relationship between the magnitude of the current and the normalized differential conductance, and analyze the role played by the injection polarity and substrate type.
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Keywords
Breakdown , High-κ , MgO
Citation
Miranda, E., O'Connor, E., Hughes, G., Casey, P., Cherkaoui, K., Monaghan, S., Long, R., O'Connell, D. and Hurley, P. K. (2009) 'Soft breakdown in MgO dielectric layers', 2009 IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium, Montreal, QC, Canada, 26-30 April, pp. 688-691. doi: 10.1109/IRPS.2009.5173330
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© 2009, IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.