Performance improvement for Metal/Al2O3/HfO2/SiO2/Si structure nonvolatile flash memory by fluorine plasma treatment

In this paper, the effects of fluorine plasma treatment on Metal/Al
₂
O
₃
/HfO
₂
/SiO
₂
/Si (MAHOS) memory structure have been investigated. With a pre-fluorine plasma treatment, MAHOS device shows enhanced program/erase (P/E) efficiency and improved room temperature/high temperature data retention characteristic. The improvement of memory performance is primarily owing to the annihilation of shallow traps originated from oxygen vacancies and interface states near HfO-SiO interface by fluorine passivation which are confirmed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) depth profile analysis and electrical characteristics.