Fabrication and Characterization of Ferroelectric Hafnium Oxide Thin Film

Over the past few years, there have been dramatic breakthroughs of the next-generation memory semiconductors. Many researchers have studied nonvolatile memory devices including FRAM(Ferroelectric random-access memory), MRAM(Magnetoresistive random-access memory), PRAM(Phase-change random-access memory), ReRAM(Resistive random-access memory), and PoRAM(Parallel Optical random-access memory). These next-generation memory semiconductors were expected to substitute DRAM and NAND memory because of their nonvolatility, and low power consumption. Despite their advantages, these nonvolatile memory devices have critical scaling issues.[1] However, in 2011, Boscke et al. reported the ferroelectric behavior of hafnium oxide(HfO₂) thin films by doped silicon.[2] Since HfO₂is compatible with silicon technology, the application of HfO₂ based memory can utilize the current CMOS technologies and can overcome the scaling issues. In this research, the ferroelectric hafnium oxide(Al: HfO₂) thin film was analyzed for application to the ferroelectric field-effect transistor(FEFET). The ferroelectric properties like remnant polarization, endurance, and retention are analyzed with different doping concentrations, annealing conditions, and film thickness.