Effects of Annealing on Ferroelectric Hafnium–Zirconium–Oxide-Based Transistor Technology

In this letter, we investigate annealing effects in ferroelectric HfZrO
_x
dielectric in metal–insulator–metal devices and metal–oxide–semiconductor capacitors by comparing two annealing methods: rapid thermal annealing (RTA) and microwave annealing (MWA). The tradeoff characteristics between the annealing conditions, polarization–electric field characteristics, gate leakage current, and interface state density (
${D} _{\textsf {it}}$
) are discussed. We show that: 1) a positive correlation between the remanent polarization (Pr), the gate leakage current, and
${D}_{\textsf {it}}$
as the annealing temperature (RTA) and the annealing power (MWA) increase and 2) the MWA is promising for ferroelectric transistors technology, since its low thermal budget can minimize
${D}_{\textsf {it}}$
and avoid increase in the gate leakage current.