Electronic and electrical properties of functional interfaces studied by hard X-ray photoemission

As the device downscaling in nanoelectronics has reached the 10 nm range, the functionality of materials employed in multilayered structures to be used in future logic and memory devices is largely defined by their interface properties. In particular, the electrical properties of the functional stacks are directly related to the electronic band line-up which is affected by the electric dipoles building up at the interface(s). In this work, hard X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy is applied to probe the electronic conditions at the interfaces of several relevant multilayered functional structures and to correlate the results with their electrical (transport) properties.