Aqueous chemical solution deposition - Fast screening method for alternative high-k materials applied to Nd2O3

Material screening of gate dielectrics for complementary metal oxide semiconductor applications is often complicated by the inability to deposit test samples. We examine the aqueous chemical solution deposition (CSD) technique as a simple, inexpensive, and fast technique to deposit thin metal-oxide layers. We deposited Nd2O3 layers on 1.2 nm SiO2. The thinnest stack (7.2 nm) yielded an equivalent oxide thickness (EOT) of 3.1 nm with a gate-leakage current of 1.4 x 10(-6) A/cm(2) at V-FB - 3 V. EOT scales linearly with physical thickness, allowing a k-value extraction, approximately 14. Our results suggest that aqueous CSD is a viable method for fast gate-dielectrics screening. (c) 2007 The Electrochemical Society.