Oxygen scavenging of HfZrO₂-based capacitors for improving ferroelectric properties

HfO₂-based ferroelectric (FE) materials have emerged as a promising material for non-volatile memory applications because of remanent polarization, scalability of thickness below 10 nm, and compatibility with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology. However, in the metal/FE/insulator/semiconductor, it is difficult to improve switching voltage (V _sw), endurance, and retention properties due to the interfacial layer (IL), which inevitably grows during the fabrication. Here, we proposed and demonstrated oxygen scavenging to reduce the IL thickness in an HfZrO -based capacitor and the thinner IL was confirmed by cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy. V _sw of a capacitor with scavenging decreased by 18% and the same P _r could be obtained at a lower voltage than a capacitor without scavenging. In addition, excellent endurance properties up to 10⁶ cycles were achieved. We believe oxygen scavenging has great potential for future HfZrO -based memory device applications.