CONNECTING ELECTRICAL AND STRUCTURAL DIELECTRIC CHARACTERISTICS

An attempt is made to correlate electrical measurement results to specific defects in the dielectric stacks of high-k/metal gate devices. Defect characteristics extracted from electrical data were compared to those obtained by ab initio calculations of the dielectric structures. It is demonstrated that oxygen vacancies in a variety of charge states and configurations in the interfacial SiO2 layer of the high-k gate stacks contribute to random telegraph noise signal, time-dependent dielectric breakdown, and the flatband voltage roll-off phenomenon.