Characteristic Variabilities of Subnanometer EOT La2O3 Gate Dielectric Film of Nano CMOS Devices

As CMOS devices are scaled down to a nanoscale range, characteristic variability has become a critical issue for yield and performance control of gigascale integrated circuit manufacturing. Nanoscale in size, few monolayers thick, and less thermally stable high-k interfaces all together cause more significant surface roughness-induced local electric field fluctuation and thus leads to a large device characteristic variability. This paper presents a comprehensive study and detailed discussion on the gate leakage variabilities of nanoscale devices corresponding to the surface roughness effects. By taking the W/La2O3/Si structure as an example, capacitance and leakage current variabilities were found to increase pronouncedly for samples even with a very low-temperature thermal annealing at 300 °C. These results can be explained consistently with the increase in surface roughness as a result of local oxidation at the La2O3/Si interface and the interface reactions at the W/La2O3 interface. The surface roughness effects are expected to be severe in future generations’ devices with even thinner gate dielectric film and smaller size of the devices.