Spectroscopic analysis of the process‐dependent microstructure of ultra‐thin high‐k gate dielectric film systems

Abstract

HfO 2 gate dielectric thin films have been exposed to anneal processing in NH 3 and N 2 ambient in order to decouple the influence of N incorporation from that of the thermal cycle alone. We report on the effectiveness of NH 3 processing to introduce N into the dielectric film system during intermediate temperature annealing. Several high-resolution techniques including electron microscopy with electron energy loss spectra (EELS), rotationally averaged selective area electron diffraction, grazing incidence X-ray diffraction and synchrotron X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) have been utilized to elucidate chemical composition and crystalline structure differences between samples annealed in NH 3 and N 2 ambient as a function of temperature.