Comparative Investigation of Interfacial Characteristics between HfO2/Al2O3 and Al2O3/HfO2 Dielectrics on AlN/p-Ge Structure

The electrical and interfacial properties of $HfO_2/Al_2O_3$ and $Al_2O_3/HfO_2$ dielectrics on AlN/p-Ge interface prepared by thermal atomic layer deposition are investigated by capacitance-voltage(C-V) and current-voltage(I-V) measurements. In the C-V measurements, humps related to mid-gap states are observed when the ac frequency is below 100 kHz, revealing lower mid-gap states for the $HfO_2/Al_2O_3$ sample. Higher frequency dispersion in the inversion region is observed for the $Al_2O_3/HfO_2$ sample, indicating the presence of slow interface states A higher interface trap density calculated from the high-low frequency method is observed for the $Al_2O_3/HfO_2$ sample. The parallel conductance method, applied to the accumulation region, shows border traps at 0.3~0.32 eV for the $Al_2O_3/HfO_2$ sample, which are not observed for the $Al_2O_3/HfO_2$ sample. I-V measurements show a reduction of leakage current of about three orders of magnitude for the $HfO_2/Al_2O_3$ sample. Using the Fowler-Nordheim emission, the barrier height is calculated and found to be about 1.08 eV for the $HfO_2/Al_2O_3$ sample. Based on these results, it is suggested that $HfO_2/Al_2O_3$ is a better dielectric stack than $Al_2O_3/HfO_2$ on AlN/p-Ge interface.