Experimental study of endurance characteristics of Al-doped HfO2 ferroelectric capacitor

In this work, the endurance characteristics of Al-doped HfO2 (HAO)-based metal-ferroelectric-metal (MFM) capacitors (which were annealed at 1000 degrees C) with various doping concentrations were investigated. The doping concentration was optimized for the high annealing temperature (1000 degrees C) process. To investigate the impact of cycling pulses on the endurance characteristics of HAO-based MFM capacitor, the rise/fall time (t ( r/f )) and hold time (t(h) ) for the cycling pulses were varied. Moreover, by adopting the recoverable fatigue process, the endurance characteristics under repetitive wake-up/fatigue processes were studied. The HAO capacitors achieved the remnant polarization (2P(r)) of 23.767 mu C cm(-2) at pristine state under the high annealing temperature. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that the endurance characteristics (similar to 10(8) cycles) of the HAO capacitors were comparable to them of other HfO2-based ferroelectric capacitors. Lastly but not least, it turned out that the amount of oxygen and oxygen vacancies in the HAO thin film was dependent of doping concentrations for the film. The impact of oxygen and oxygen vacancies was quantitatively analyzed, in detail, with TEM, XPS and GIXRD analysis.