Electrical characteristics of MOSFET's utilizing Oxygen—Argon sputter-deposited gate Oxide films

This paper presents a detailed look at the electrical characteristics of MOSFET's utilizing oxygen-argon sputter-deposited gate-oxide films for low-temperature MOSFET fabrication. The gate-oxide films are deposited at low temperature (200°C) by oxygen-argon sputtering of an SiO
2
target. The MOSFET's so formed are confirmed to have triode characteristics. Moreover, oxygen mixing makes it possible to considerably improve the MOSFET field-effect mobility and subthreshold slope over those of argon-only sputter-deposited film to 700 cm
²
/V's and 170 mV/decade. These improvements are found to be caused by the remarkable reduction in surface-state density. These results confirm the usefulness of oxygen-argon sputter-deposited gate-oxide films for MOSFET fabrication at low temperature.