Investigation on the dominant key to achieve superior Ge surface passivation by GeO based on the ozone oxidation

Abstract The dominant key to achieve superior Ge surface passivation by GeO x interfacial layer is investigated based on ozone oxidation. The interface state density ( D it ) measured from low temperature conduction method is found to decrease with increasing the GeO x thickness (0.26–1.06 nm). The X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) is employed to demonstrate the interfacial structure of GeO x /Ge with different GeO x thicknesses. And the XPS results show that Ge 3+ oxide component is responsible to the decrease of the D it due to the effective passivation of Ge dangling bonds. Therefore, the formation of Ge 3+ component is the dominant key to achieve low D it for Ge gate stacks. Our work confirms that the same physical mechanism determines the Ge surface passivation by the GeO x regardless of the oxidation methods to grow the GeO x interfacial layer. As a result, to explore a growth process that can realize sufficient Ge 3+ component in the GeO x interlayer as thin as possible is important to achieve both equivalent oxide thickness scaling and superior interfacial property simultaneously. This conclusion is helpful to engineer the optimization of the Ge gate stacks.