Facing-target mid-frequency magnetron reactive sputtered hafnium oxide film: Morphology and electrical properties

Amorphous hafnium dioxide (HfO 2 ) film was prepared on Si (100) by facing-target mid-frequency reactive magnetron sputtering under different oxygen/argon gas ratio at room temperature with high purity Hf target. 3D surface profiler results showed that the deposition rates of HfO 2 thin film under different O 2 /Ar gas ratio remain unchanged, indicating that the facing target midfrequency magnetron sputtering system provides effective approach to eliminate target poisoning phenomenon which is generally occurred in reactive sputtering procedure. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) demonstrated that the gradual reduction of oxygen vacancy concentration and the densification of deposited film structure with the increase of oxygen/argon (O 2 /Ar) gas flow ratio. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) analysis suggested that the surface of the as-deposited HfO 2 thin film tends to be smoother, the root-meansquare roughness (RMS) reduced from 0.876 nm to 0.333 nm while O 2 /Ar gas flow ratio increased from 1/4 to 1/1. Current-Voltage measurements of MOS capacitor based on Au/HfO 2 /Si structure indicated that the leakage current density of HfO 2 thin films decreased by increasing of oxygen partial pressure, which resulted in the variations of pore size and oxygen vacancy concentration in deposited thin films. Based on the above characterization results the leakage current mechanism for all samples was discussed systematically.