Impact of Chamber/Annealing Temperature on the Endurance Characteristic of Zr:HfO₂ Ferroelectric Capacitor

The endurance characteristic of Zr-doped HfO2 (HZO)-based metal–ferroelectric–metal (MFM) capacitors fabricated under various deposition/annealing temperatures in the atomic layer deposition (ALD) process was investigated. The chamber temperature in the ALD process was set to 120 °C, 200 °C, or 250 °C, and the annealing temperature was set to 400 °C, 500 °C, 600 °C, or 700 °C. For the given annealing temperature of 700 °C, the remnant polarization (2Pr) was 17.21 µC/cm2, 26.37 µC/cm2, and 31.8 µC/cm2 at the chamber temperatures of 120 °C, 200 °C, and 250 °C, respectively. For the given/identical annealing temperature, the largest remnant polarization (Pr) was achieved when using the chamber temperature of 250 °C. At a higher annealing temperature, the grain size in the HZO layer becomes smaller, and thereby, it enables to boost up Pr. It was observed that the endurance characteristics for the capacitors fabricated under various annealing/chamber temperatures were quite different. The different endurance characteristics are due to the oxygen and oxygen vacancies in ferroelectric films, which affects the wakeup/fatigue behaviors. However, in common, all the capacitors showed no breakdown for an externally applied pulse (up to 108 cycles of the pulse)