Effects of Annealing on Ferroelectric Hafnium-Zirconium-Oxide-Based Transistor Technology

In this letter, we investigate annealing effects in ferroelectric HfZrO_x dielectric in metal-insulator-metal devices and metal-oxide-semiconductor capacitors by comparing two annealing methods: rapid thermal annealing (RTA) and microwave annealing (MWA). The tradeoff characteristics between the annealing conditions, polarization-electric field characteristics, gate leakage current, and interface state density Dit) are discussed. We show that: 1) a positive correlation between the remanent polarization (Pr), the gate leakage current, and Dit as the annealing temperature (RTA) and the annealing power (MWA) increase and 2) the MWA is promising for ferroelectric transistors technology, since its low thermal budget can minimize Dit and avoid increase in the gate leakage current.