Finding the temperature window for atomic layer deposition of ruthenium metal via efficient phonon calculations

We investigate the use of first principles thermodynamics based on periodic density functional theory (DFT) to examine the gas-surface chemistry of an oxidized ruthenium surface reacting with hydrogen gas. This reaction system features in the growth of ultrathin Ru films by atomic layer deposition (ALD). We reproduce and rationalize the experimental observation that ALD of the metal from RuO₄ and H₂ occurs only in a narrow temperature window above 100 °C, and this validates the approach. Specifically, the temperature-dependent reaction free energies are computed for the competing potential reactions of the H₂ reagent, and show that surface oxide is reduced to water, which is predicted to desorb thermally above 113 °C, exposing bare Ru that can further react to surface hydride, and hence deposit Ru metal. The saturating coverages give a predicted growth rate of 0.7 Å per cycle of Ru. At lower temperatures, free energies indicate that water is retained at the surface and reacts with the RuO₄ precursor to form an oxide film, also in agreement with experiment. The temperature dependence is obtained with the required accuracy by computing Gibbs free energy corrections from phonon calculations within the harmonic approximation. Surface phonons are computed rapidly and efficiently by parallelization on a cloud architecture within the Schrödinger Materials Science Suite. We also show that rotational and translational entropy of gases dominate the free energies, permitting an alternative approach without phonon calculations, which would be suitable for rapid pre-screening of gas-surface chemistries.