Support for Conference on Defects in Nanoelectronic Materials; St. Petersburg, Russia

Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Brunswick NJ

Investigators

Abstract

Technical. A workshop to address defects in advanced high-k dielectrics will be held in St. Petersburg, Russia, July 11 -14, 2005. The workshop provides a timely forum for researchers to examine the complex scientific and technological issues that pertain to the use of advanced high-k materials in next generation semiconductor devices. A unique feature of the workshop is a special focus on defects in these materials. Intellectual merit: Conventional SiO2/Si-based MOSFET's are approaching the fundamental limit of scaling. Below 1 nm in gate dielectric thickness, leakage currents degrade dielectric performance and reliability, preventing practical use for conventional SiO2. It is thought that a feasible solution to the gate oxide scaling problem may be to replace SiO2 with novel high permittivity (high-k) gate dielectric materials. Despite significant progress achieved in this area of research, high-k materials are still satisfactory in the gate stack. The key obstacles to high-k integration into Si nano-technology appear to be electronic defects. However, little is known about the atomic scale nature of the defects or about possible techniques to eliminate, or to minimize them. Non-technical. The requested funds will be used to support students, women, minorities and young scientists to attend the Workshop. Participating in the conference is expected to increase their knowledge of the field and help them bring back to the U.S. new ideas and results from leading laboratories in Europe and elsewhere in the world. It will also help these and other U.S. participants to identify priority directions for future research in the field. Conference results/papers will be published as a book by Springer-Verlag by the end of the year. The website for the workshop is: http://www.ioffe.ru/natoarw/2005/info.html . The workshop is co-funded by MPS/DMR and OISE.