High-Performance Thin-Film Transistor with Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD)-Derived Indium-Gallium Oxide Channel for Back-End-of-Line Compatible Transistor Applications: Cation Combinatorial Approach.

In this paper, the feasibility of an indium-gallium oxide (In2(1-x)Ga2xOy) film through combinatorial atomic layer deposition (ALD) as an alternative channel material for back-end-of-line (BEOL) compatible transistor applications is studied. The microstructure of random polycrystalline In2Oy with a bixbyite structure was converted to the amorphous phase of In2(1-x)Ga2xOy film under thermal annealing at 400 °C when the fraction of Ga is ≥29 at. %. In contrast, the enhancement in the orientation of the (222) face and subsequent grain size was observed for the In1.60Ga0.40Oy film with the intermediate Ga fraction of 20 at. %. The suitability as a channel layer was tested on the 10-nm-thick HfO2 gate oxide where the natural length was designed to meet the requirement of short channel devices with a smaller gate length (<100 nm). The In1.60Ga0.40Oy thin-film transistors (TFTs) exhibited the high field-effect mobility (µFE) of 71.27 ± 0.98 cm2/(V s), low subthreshold gate swing (SS) of 74.4 mV/decade, threshold voltage (VTH) of -0.3 V, and ION/OFF ratio of >108, which would be applicable to the logic devices such as peripheral circuit of heterogeneous DRAM. The in-depth origin for this promising performance was discussed in detail, based on physical, optical, and chemical analysis.

Tuning the electronic structure of tin sulfides grown by atomic layer deposition.

In this study, tin sulfide thin films were obtained by atomic layer deposition (ALD) using Tetrakis(dimethylamino)tin (TDMASn, [(CH3)2N]4Sn) and hydrogen sulfide (H2S). The growth rate of the tin sulfides (SnSx) was shown to be highly dependent on the deposition temperature, and reaction times of 1 second for the TDMASn and H2S were required to reach the saturation regime. Surface morphologies were smooth or rectangular with rounded corners as observed by a field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) and were dependent on temperature. X-ray diffraction results confirmed that the crystal structure of SnSx can be tuned by changing the ALD temperature. Below 120 °C, SnSx films appeared to be amorphous. In addition, SnSx films were SnS2 hexagonal at 140 and 150 °C and SnS orthorhombic above 160 °C. Similarly, the values of the optical band gap and binding energy showed significant differences between 150 and 160 °C. The electronic structures of SnSx were extracted by UPS and absorption spectroscopy, and the unsaturated Sn 3d molecular orbital (MO) states in the band edge were found to be responsible for the great improvement in electrical conductivity. This study shows that TDMASn-H2S ALD is an effective deposition method for SnSx films, offering a simple approach to tune the physical properties.