Electrical characteristics of β-Ga2O3 thin films grown by PEALD

• In this study, β-Ga2O3 thin films were grown by PEALD.
• Microstructures of β-Ga2O3 thin films were examined.
• I–V and C–V characterizations of Al/β-Ga2O3/p-Si SBDs were carried out.
• The main electrical parameters were obtained from the I–V and C–V measurements.
• Results show that PEALD β-Ga2O3 thin films can be used as oxide layer for MOS devices.

In this work, 7.5 nm Ga2O3 dielectric thin films have been deposited on p-type (1 1 1) silicon wafer using plasma enhanced atomic layer deposition (PEALD) technique. After the deposition, Ga2O3 thin films were annealed under N2 ambient at 600, 700, and 800 °C to obtain β-phase. The structure and microstructure of the β-Ga2O3 thin films was carried out by using grazing-incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXRD). To show effect of annealing temperature on the microstructure of β-Ga2O3 thin films, average crystallite size was obtained from the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of Bragg lines using the Scherrer formula. It was found that crystallite size increased with increasing annealing temperature and changed from 0.8 nm to 9.1 nm with annealing. In order to perform electrical characterization on the deposited films, Al/β-Ga2O3/p-Si metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) type Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs) were fabricated using the β-Ga2O3 thin films were annealed at 800 °C. The main electrical parameters such as leakage current level, reverse breakdown voltage, series resistance (RS), ideality factor (n  ), zero-bias barrier height (ϕBoϕBo), and interface states (NSS) were obtained from the current–voltage (I–V) and capacitance–voltage (C–V) measurements at room temperature. The RS values were calculated by using Cheung methods. The energy density distribution profile of the interface states as a function of (ESS–EV) was obtained from the forward bias I–V   measurements by taking bias dependence of ideality factor, effective barrier height (ϕeϕe), and RS into account. Also using the Norde function and C–V   technique, ϕeϕe values were calculated and cross-checked. Results show that β-Ga2O3 thin films deposited by PEALD technique at low temperatures can be used as oxide layer for MOS devices and electrical properties of these devices are influenced by some important parameters such as NSS, RS, and β-Ga2O3 oxide layer.