Band alignment and electrical investigations of ultra-thin Al2O3 on Si by E-beam evaporation

The continuous downscaling leads the search of high-gate dielectrics. The films amorphous in nature offered good mechanical flexibility, smooth surfaces and better uniformity associated with low leakage current density. In this work, 16 nm thick amorphous Al2O3 films on silicon substrate are fabricated by E-beam evaporation. The high value of refractive index (1.76) extracted from ellipsometry analysis directs the deposition of compact film. The AFM analysis reveal a flat surface with small RMS surface roughness 1.5 angstrom. The band gap is extracted from O-1s electron loss spectra and was found 6.7 eV and band alignment of Al2O3/Si is derived from the UPS measurements. The films are incorporated in Metal Insulator -Semiconductor (MIS) capacitor to perform the electrical measurement. The flat band voltage (V-FB), dielectric constant () and oxide trapped charges (Q(ot)) extracted from high frequency (1 MHz) C-V curve are - 0.4 V, 8.4 and 2 x 10(11) cm(-2), respectively. The small flat band voltage - 0.4 V, narrow hysteresis and very little frequency dispersion suggest an exceptional good Al2O3/Si interface with small quantity of trapped charges in the oxide. The leakage current density was 4.27 x 10(-8) A/cm(2) at 1 V. The moderate dielectric constant and low leakage current density with ultra-smooth surface is quite useful towards its application in future CMOS and memory devices.