Grain boundary-driven leakage path formation in HfO2 dielectrics

By Gennadi Bersuker, J. Yum, Luca Vandelli, Andrea Padovani, L. Larcher, V. Iglesias, M. Porti, M. Nafría, Keith P. McKenna, A. Shluger and 2 more. 2010 Proceedings of the European Solid State Device Research Conference, 2011

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The time evolution of the leakage current in HfO2 based MIM capacitors under constant voltage stress applied either continuously or with periodic interruptions was studied for a range of stress voltages and temperatures. The data analysis was performed based on the results of the conductive AFM measurements demonstrating preferential current flow along grain boundaries (GB) in the HfO2 dielectric and ab initio calculations, which show the formation of a conductive sub-band due to oxygen vacancy precipitation at GBs. The proposed model suggests that the observed reversible increase in leakage current is caused by the defects segregation at GBs and electron trapping/detrapping at these defects. The energy characteristics of the electrically active defects extracted from the electrical measurements match well with those calculated for neutral oxygen vacancies in hafnia.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8160480c4a7b75c742fdc7bdd6aa0a2b50b5dd6b

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Gennadi Bersuker
2. Luca Larcher
3. Luca Vandelli
4. O. Pirrotta
5. Andrea Padovani
6. Daniele Ielmini

Citations in the corpus

• Microscopic Modeling of HfOx RRAM Operations: From Forming to Switching (2015, background): “Ab-initio calculations and conductive atomic force microscopy measurements indicate that positively charged oxygen vacancies accumulate in the GBs, while oxygen ions are energetically driven to diffuse out of the GB sites [16], [17].”