We report on gallium droplet nucleation on silicon (100) substrates with and without the presence of the native oxide. The gallium deposition is carried out under ultra-high vacuum conditions at temperatures between 580 and 630 °C. The total droplet volume, obtained from a fit to the diameter-density relation, is used for sample analysis on clean silicon surfaces. Through a variation of the 2D equivalent Ga thickness, the droplet diameter was found to be between 250-1000 nm. Longer annealing times resulted in a decrease of the total droplet volume. Substrate temperatures of 630 °C and above led to Ga etching into the Si substrates and caused Si precipitation around the droplets. In contrast, we obtained an almost constant diameter distribution around 75 nm over a density range of more than two orders of magnitude in the presence of a native oxide layer. Furthermore, the droplet nucleation was found to correlate with the density of surface features on the 'epi-ready' wafer.

High resolution TEM analysis of focused ion beam amorphized regions in single crystal silicon-A complementary materials analysis of the teardrop method

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Hafnia–zirconia (HfO2–ZrO2) solid solution thin films have emerged as viable candidates for electronic applications due to their compatibility with Si technology and demonstrated ferroelectricity at the nanoscale. The oxygen source in atomic layer deposition (ALD) plays a crucial role in determining the impurity concentration and phase composition of HfO2–ZrO2 within metal–ferroelectric–metal devices, notably at the Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 /TiN interface. The interface characteristics of HZO/TiN are fabricated via sequential no-atmosphere processing (SNAP) with either H2O or O2-plasma to study the influence of oxygen source on buried interfaces. Time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry reveals that HZO films grown via O2-plasma promote the development of an interfacial TiO x layer at the bottom HZO/TiN interface. The presence of the TiO x layer leads to the development of 111-fiber texture in HZO as confirmed by two-dimensional X-ray diffraction (2D-XRD). Structural and chemical differences between HZO films grown via H2O or O2-plasma were found to strongly affect electrical characteristics such as permittivity, leakage current density, endurance, and switching kinetics. While HZO films grown via H2O yielded a higher remanent polarization value of 25 μC/cm2, HZO films grown via O2-plasma exhibited a comparable P r of 21 μC/cm2 polarization and enhanced field cycling endurance limit by almost 2 orders of magnitude. Our study illustrates how oxygen sources (O2-plasma or H2O) in ALD can be a viable way to engineer the interface and properties in HZO thin films.

Ferroelectric tunneling junctions (FTJ) are considered to be the intrinsically most energy efficient memristors. In this work, specific electrical features of ferroelectric hafnium-zirconium oxide based FTJ devices are investigated. Moreover, the impact on the design of FTJ-based circuits for edge computing applications is discussed by means of two example circuits.