Improved anti-ferroelectric properties enabled by high pressure annealing for eDRAM applications

The non-ideal characteristics at the interfaces of anti-ferroelectric (AFE) film and electrodes will greatly affect the potential performance in the way to embedded dynamic random-access memory applications. In this paper, we have proposed a high-performance AFE TiN/HfxZr1−xO2/TiN capacitor fabricated by fully atomic layer deposition grown and alcohol-thermal high-pressure annealing methods that have been employed to avoid exposure to the ambient atmosphere and cure the interface defects induced by the inevitable oxidization of electrodes. Due to the high improvement of the interface quality, the capacitors based on ultra-thin (∼6 nm) AFE film show competitive memory performances, such as low operating voltage (−0.6/1.8 V), high speed (10 ns), long retention time (103 s), and high endurance (1012). The final benchmark demonstrates that the proposed AFE TiN/HfxZr1−xO2/TiN capacitor is a promising candidate toward the next generation high-speed and high-density embedded memory.