Impact of Chamber/Annealing Temperature on the Endurance Characteristic of Zr:HfO 2 Ferroelectric Capacitor.

The endurance characteristic of Zr-doped HfO 2 (HZO)-based metal-ferroelectric-metal (MFM) capacitors fabricated under various deposition/annealing temperatures in the atomic layer deposition (ALD) process was investigated. The chamber temperature in the ALD process was set to 120 °C, 200 °C, or 250 °C, and the annealing temperature was set to 400 °C, 500 °C, 600 °C, or 700 °C. For the given annealing temperature of 700 °C, the remnant polarization (2P r ) was 17.21 µC/cm 2 , 26.37 µC/cm 2 , and 31.8 µC/cm 2 at the chamber temperatures of 120 °C, 200 °C, and 250 °C, respectively. For the given/identical annealing temperature, the largest remnant polarization (P r ) was achieved when using the chamber temperature of 250 °C. At a higher annealing temperature, the grain size in the HZO layer becomes smaller, and thereby, it enables to boost up P r . It was observed that the endurance characteristics for the capacitors fabricated under various annealing/chamber temperatures were quite different. The different endurance characteristics are due to the oxygen and oxygen vacancies in ferroelectric films, which affects the wakeup/fatigue behaviors. However, in common, all the capacitors showed no breakdown for an externally applied pulse (up to 10 8 cycles of the pulse).