Study on deposition kinetics of high-K materials by X-ray fluorescence techniques

X-ray fluorescence (XRF) techniques have been used to study, on different pretreated substrates, deposition kinetics of HfO2 and Al2O3, two of the possible high-K materials under evaluation for future integration in microelectronic devices. fluorescence (XRF) and total X-ray fluorescence (TXRF) measurements demonstrate their capability to give useful information on the very initial growing cycles of deposition and on carbon and chlorine inclusion in the film. Moreover, XRF signal shows a good linear correlation with layer thickness for thick samples of both materials.