Articles you may be interested inEffects of rapid thermal annealing on the properties of HfO2/La2O3 nanolaminate films deposited by plasma enhanced atomic layer deposition J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 33, 01A116 (2015); 10.1116/1.4900935 Engineering crystallinity of atomic layer deposited gate stacks containing ultrathin HfO2 and a Ti-based metal gate: Effects of postmetal gate anneal and integration schemes J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 32, 03D122 (2014); 10.1116/1.4869162 Physical and electrical characterization of Ce-HfO2 thin films deposited by thermal atomic layer deposition J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 32, 03D103 (2014); 10.1116/1.4826174 Film properties of low temperature HfO2 grown with H2O, O3, or remote O2-plasma J.In this work, attempts were made to increase the k values of the HfO 2 film by transforming its structure from monoclinic to tetragonal phase. The tetragonal seed HfO 2 layer and multilayer approaches were tested based on the fact that the HfO 2 film deposited via atomic layer deposition (ALD) using O 2 as the oxygen source induced tetragonal-phase HfO 2 after the post deposition annealing (PDA) at temperatures higher than 700 C. Both approaches, however, failed to transform the monoclinic HfO 2 layer grown via ALD using O 3 as the oxygen source, which suggests that the driving force for forming the thermodynamic stable phase (monoclinic) overwhelms the interface energy effect between the two different phases, which would have induced the desired transformation. As another approach, the HfO 2 films were alloyed with ZrO 2 , which was an effective method of changing the structure from monoclinic to tetragonal. While the k values of the Hf 1Àx Zr x O 2 (HZO) film could be tuned by the Zr concentration and the PDA temperature, the increase of the PDA temperature to over 800 C induced the compositional segregation of HZO, which largely increased the leakage current. A critical Zr concentration was found (between 50 and 70%), in which the k-value increase was quite abrupt but the increase in leakage was not very evident after the PDA at 700 C. V C 2014 American Vacuum Society.