Fowler-Nordheim tunneling in epitaxial yttrium oxide on silicon for high-k gate applications

Fowler-Nordheim tunneling occurs in epitaxially grown Y/sub 2/O/sub 3/ on Si [100]. The barrier height evaluated from F-N plots was found to be about 1 eV and 1.4 eV for negative and positive gate bias, respectively. Further in-situ annealing decreases the barrier height for negative gate bias to about 0.38 eV.