Statistics of electrical breakdown field in HfO2 and SiO2 films from millimeter to nanometer length scales

Abstract

The statistics of electrical breakdown field (Ebd) of HfO2 and SiO2 thin films has been evaluated over multiple length scales using macroscopic testing of standardized metal-oxide-semiconductor (TiN∕SiO2∕Si) and metal-insulator-metal (TiN∕HfO2∕TiN) capacitors (10−2mm2–10μm2 area) on a full 200mm wafer along with conductive-atomic-force microscopy. It is shown that Ebd follows the same Weibull distribution when the data are scaled using the testing area. This overall scaling suggests that the defect density is ∼1015cm−2 and Ebd is ∼40MV∕cm for nanometer-length scales; as such, breakdown in these materials is most likely initiated by bond breaking rather than punctual defects.

Review—Investigation and Review of the Thermal, Mechanical, Electrical, Optical, and Structural Properties of Atomic Layer Deposited High-kDielectrics: Beryllium Oxide, Aluminum Oxide, Hafnium Oxide, and Aluminum Nitride

“…Concerning E bd , we note that the values summarized in Table II are consistent with other reports, 18,28,189,203,226,227 and scale roughly with previously reported reflection electron energy loss spectroscopy (REELS) bandgap (E g ) measurements performed on identical materials (see Fig. 5).…”

The thickness and stretch dependence of the electrical breakdown strength of an acrylic dielectric elastomer

“…28,29 Amongst the clearest studies of electrode size effects is the recent study of hafnia and silica films which also show that the smaller the contact area, the larger is the breakdown field. 30 We also observe a thickness dependence of the electric breakdown field (Fig. 2b) but this is less marked than has previously been reported.…”

Field-effect induced tunability in hyperbolic metamaterials

“…The results presented here are also relevant for other TCOs like aluminum doped zinc oxide (AZO) [38], gallium doped zinc oxide (GZO) [36,38] or transition-metal nitrides [37] and degenerately doped semiconductors [35], as illustrated by a sensitivity analysis on the material electronic properties of the active layer discussed in Part II, C. Good high-k dielectric quality is important for sustaining high carrier concentrations at the accumulation layer of ITO and, in turn, provides large tunability of the effective parameters of a planar HMM. HfO 2 is a particularly attractive dielectric for modulation of carrier density in a field-effect tunable metamaterial unit cell due to its simultaneously large values of DC dielectric constant [44,46,48,50,51], and its high breakdown field. C. Sire et al [44] have achieved breakdown fields as high as 40-60MV/cm, but the electrode geometry and area utilized in these experiments (AFM tip) is not typical of larger-area field effect devices.…”

“…HfO 2 is a particularly attractive dielectric for modulation of carrier density in a field-effect tunable metamaterial unit cell due to its simultaneously large values of DC dielectric constant [44,46,48,50,51], and its high breakdown field. C. Sire et al [44] have achieved breakdown fields as high as 40-60MV/cm, but the electrode geometry and area utilized in these experiments (AFM tip) is not typical of larger-area field effect devices. Y. H. Kim et al have obtained breakdown fields as high as 36MV/ cm [52] for large-area (up to 100 micron x 100 micron) planar field effect electrode geometries while values in the range 5 −10MV / cm have been broadly reported in the literature [53, 54, 55 , 56].…”