Soft breakdown in MgO dielectric layers

Author

Miranda, E. ; O´Connor, E. ; Hughes, G. ; Casey, P. ; Cherkaoui, K. ; Monaghan, S. ; Long, R. ; O´Connell, D. ; Hurley, P.K.

Author_Institution

Escola Tec. Super. d´´Eng., Univ. Autonoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

fYear

2009

fDate

26-30 April 2009

Firstpage

688

Lastpage

691

Abstract

In this work, we report on the occurrence of the soft breakdown (SBD) failure mode in 20 nm-thick films of magnesium oxide (MgO) grown on Si substrates. To our knowledge, this is the first observation of this failure mechanism in a high-kappa gate dielectric with such a large oxide thickness. We show that the I-V characteristics follow the power-law dependence typical of SBD conduction in a wider voltage range than that reported for SiO₂. We pay special attention to the relationship between the magnitude of the current and the normalized differential conductance, and analyze the role played by the injection polarity and substrate type.

Keywords

electric breakdown; high-k dielectric thin films; magnesium compounds; permittivity; I-V characteristics; MgO; dielectric layers; high-kappa gate dielectric; injection polarity; normalized differential conductance; size 20 nm; soft breakdown failure mode; Dielectric breakdown; Dielectric substrates; Electric breakdown; Event detection; Failure analysis; Leakage current; Magnesium oxide; Semiconductor films; Thermal conductivity; Voltage; MgO; breakdown; high-κ;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Reliability Physics Symposium, 2009 IEEE International

Conference_Location

Montreal, QC

ISSN

1541-7026

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-2888-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IRPS.2009.5173330

Filename

5173330