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

Abstract

In this letter, we investigate annealing effects in ferroelectric HfZrOx 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 (D-it) are discussed. We show that: 1) a positive correlation between the remanent polarization (Pr), the gate leakage current, and D-it 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 D-it and avoid increase in the gate leakage current.