Advanced gate dielectric materials for sub-100 nm CMOS

Properties of lanthanide oxides for gate insulators are studied with comparison to ZrO/sub 2/ and HfO/sub 2/. Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) was used for the deposition of the 'amorphous' high-k films on n-type [100] Si substrates. The deposited films were annealed in N/sub 2/ or O/sub 2/ ambient at different temperatures and Al electrodes were deposited to fabricate MIS capacitors. Our La/sub 2/O/sub 3/ results showed excellent characteristics such as J = 5.5/spl times/10/sup -4/ cm/sup -2/ @ EOT = 0.61 nm.