A theoretical model for tunnel leakage current through 1.65–3.90-nm-thick gate oxides in metal-oxide-semiconductor structures has been developed. The electron effective mass in the oxide layer and the Fermi energy in the n+ poly-Si gate are the only two fitting parameters. It is shown that the calculated tunnel current is well fitted to the measured one over the entire oxide thickness range when the nonparabolic E-k dispersion relationship for the oxide band gap is employed. The electron effective mass in the oxide layer tends to increase as the oxide thickness decreases to less than 2.80 nm presumably due to the existence of compressive stress in the oxide layer near the SiO2/Si(100) interface.
A model of leakage current in Al/HfO 2 /SiO 2 /Si MOS (metal-oxide-semiconductor) capacitors is given by adopting the tunnel current model in SiGe-based heterojunction bipolar transistors. The velocity of an electron in the metal gate, which originates from the coupling between longitudinal and transverse (in-plane) kinetic energies, and the anisotropic mass of the substrate were included in the leakage current model. It was found that the leakage current obtained by including the gate electron velocity is lower than that calculated without the coupling effect and the leakage current decreases with an increasing gate electron velocity. However, the leakage current is not significantly influenced by the silicon substrate orientation. If a measured leakage current in the high-K dielectric stack MOS with Si(100) substrate were much higher than that in the MOS with Si(111) as observed in the conventional MOS, then the gate electron phase velocity in the latter would be higher. A small increase of the equivalent oxide thickness (EOT) of HfO 2 will decrease the tunnel current appreciably and tunnel current oscillations become visible as the EOT becomes thicker. Oscillatory behavior of the tunnel current is due to resonance states in the quantum well formed in high-K dielectric stack at high electric fields.
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