The improvement of electric property and reduction of boron penetration in metal–oxide–Si (MOS) capacitors are clearly achieved by the combination of a gate electrode deposited using amorphous Si(a-Si) and a gate oxynitride formed by a two-step N2O nitridation. The charge-to-breakdown performance of MOS capacitors fabricated by this technique is excellent. The hot-electron induced interface traps and flatband voltage shifts are significantly reduced. This reliability improvement can be explained in terms of a mechanism based on an increase in compressive stress (macroscopic strain) in the oxynitride and relaxation of SiO2/Si interfacial strain. Also this improvement can be due to a reduction of hydrogen-related species diffused from the gate electrode, which is achieved by nitrogen pileup at the gate electrode/oxynitride interface. Boron penetration is significantly suppressed by an a-Si gate electrode because of a larger grain size and a longer dopant diffusion path. The boron penetration is also clearly reduced by a gate oxynitride formed using a two-step N2O nitridation. Boron penetration reduction for this oxynitride can be attributed to the nitrogen incorporation into the gate electrode/oxynitride interface. This approach would be useful for the processes of gate electrode and gate dielectric in the deep submicron MOS transistors.

We studied the optical, electrical, and structural properties of indium-free Zr-doped ZnO (ZZO)/Ag/ZZO multilayers prepared on poly(ether sulfone) (PES) substrates by RF magnetron sputtering at room temperature. The optical and electrical characteristics of the crystalline ZZO/Ag/ZZO multilayer electrodes can be improved by the insertion of a nano-sized Ag interlayer with an optimized thickness between top and bottom ZZO films, owing to the very low resistivity. The ZZO/Ag (12 nm)/ZZO/PES exhibited high transmittance of ³85.6% in the wavelength range from 450 to 600 nm and a low resistivity of ³6 © 10 ¹5 ³·cm. Additionally, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) investigations for the ZZO/Ag/ZZO multilayers confirmed no interfacial reaction between the ZZO and Ag films. The performances indicate that the indium-free ZZO/Ag/ZZO multilayers are promising as transparent conducting films for low-cost flexible optoelectronics applications.