Gate leakage current is reduced up to 24% using a highly doped polysilicon gate/nitrided oxide gate stack. Interestingly, various factors that could affect the gate leakage current such as equivalent oxide thickness (EOT), overlap capacitance, gate dielectric reliability and sub-threshold voltage were found to be unrelated to the reduction in leakage current. Instead, an additional band offset due to an interfacial dipole at the highly doped polysilicon gate and nitrided oxide interface is proposed to explain the anti-intuitive leakage current reduction. This result implies that there is an optimal gate doping condition that will minimize the leakage current accounting a trade-off between the effect of the interfacial dipole and reliability.

Threshold switching is a phenomenon where the resistivity of an insulating material changes and the insulator exhibits metallic behavior. This could be explained by phase transformation in oxide materials; however, this behavior is also seen in amorphous insulators. In this study, through an ex-situ experiment using transmission electron microscopy (TEM), we proved that threshold switching of amorphous NbO2 accompanies local crystallization. The change in I V characteristics after electroforming was examined by evaluating the concentration profile. Atom probe tomography (APT) combined with in-situ TEM probing technique was performed to understand the threshold switching in amorphous NbO2. The local crystallization in amorphous NbO2 was validated by the observed difference in time-of-flight (ToF) between amorphous and crystalline NbO2. We concluded that the slower ToF of amorphous NbO2 (a-NbO2) compared with crystalline NbO2 (a-NbO2) is due to the resistivity difference and trap-assisted recombination. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Laser-assisted atom probe tomography has opened the way to three-dimensional visualization of nanostructures. However, many questions related to the laser-matter interaction remain unresolved. We demonstrate that the interface reaction can be activated by laser-assisted field evaporation and affects the quantification of the interfacial composition. At a vertical interface between Si and SiO2, a SiO2 molecule tends to combine with a Si atom and evaporate as a SiO molecule, reducing the evaporation field. The features of the reaction depend on the direction of the laser illumination and the inner structure of tip. A high concentration of SiO is observed at a vertical interface between Si and SiO2 when the Si column is positioned at the center of the tip, whereas no significant SiO is detected when the SiO2 layer is at the center. The difference in the interfacial compositions of two samples was due to preferential evaporation of the Si layer. This was explained using transmission electron microscopy observations before and after atom probe experiments. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Device instabilities of graphene metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistors such as hysteresis and Dirac point shifts have been attributed to charge trapping in the underlying substrate, especially in SiO2. In this letter, trapping time constants around 87 mu s and 1.76 ms were identified using a short pulse current-voltage method. The values of two trapping time constants with reversible trapping behavior indicate that the hysteretic behaviors of graphene field effect transistors are due to neither charge trapping in the bulk SiO2 or tunneling into other interfacial materials. Also, it is concluded that the dc measurement method significantly underestimated the performance of graphene devices. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3588033]