Hall mobility enhancement caused by annealing of Si0.2Ge0.8/Si0.7Ge0.3/Si(001) p-type modulation-doped heterostructures

The effect of post-growth furnace thermal annealing (FTA) on the Hall mobility and sheet carrier density measured at 9–300 K in the Si0.2Ge0.8/Si0.7Ge0.3/Si(001) p-type modulation-doped heterostructures was studied. FTA treatments in the temperature range of 600–900 °C for 30 min were performed on similar heterostructures but with two Si0.2Ge0.8 channel thicknesses. The annealing at 600 °C is seen to have a negligible effect on the Hall mobility as well as on the sheet carrier density. Increases in the annealing temperature resulted in pronounced successive increases of the mobility. For both samples the maximum Hall mobility was observed after FTA at 750 °C. Further increases of the annealing temperature resulted in a decrease in mobility. The sheet carrier density showed the opposite behavior with an increase in annealing temperature. The mechanism causing this behavior is discussed. Structural characterization of as-grown and annealed samples was done by cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy

Energy loss rates of two-dimensional hole gases in inverted Si/Si0.8Ge0.2 heterostructures

We have investigated the energy loss rate of hot holes as a function of carrier temperature TC in p-type inverted modulation-doped (MD) Si/SiGe heterostructures over the carrier sheet density range (3.5–13)×1011 cm–2, at lattice temperatures of 0.34 and 1.8 K. It is found that the energy loss rate (ELR) depends significantly upon the carrier sheet density, n2D. Such an n2D dependence of ELR has not been observed previously in p-type SiGe MD structures. The extracted effective mass decreases as n2D increases, which is in agreement with recent measurements on a gated inverted sample. It is shown that the energy relaxation of the two-dimensional hole gases is dominated by unscreened acoustic phonon scattering and a deformation potential of 3.0±0.4 eV is deduced

Reverse graded relaxed buffers for high Ge content SiGe virtual substrates

An innovative approach is proposed for epitaxial growth of high Ge content, relaxed Si1−xGex buffer layers on a Si(001) substrate. The advantages of the technique are demonstrated by growing such structures via chemical vapor deposition and their characterization. Relaxed Ge is first grown on the substrate followed by the reverse grading approach to reach a final buffer composition of 0.78. The optimized buffer structure is only 2.8 µm thick and demonstrates a low surface threading dislocation density of 4×106 cm−2, with a surface roughness of 2.6 nm. The buffers demonstrate a relaxation of up to 107%

Hole density dependence of effective mass, mobility and transport time in strained Ge channel modulation-doped heterostructures

We performed systematic low-temperature (T = 350 mK–15 K) magnetotransport measurements on the two-dimensional hole gas with various sheet carrier densities Ps = (0.57–2.1)×1012 cm–2 formed in the strained Ge channel modulation-doped (MOD) SiGe heterostructures grown on Si substrates. It was found that the effective hole mass deduced by temperature dependent Shubnikov–de Hass oscillations increased monotonically from (0.087±0.05)m0 to (0.19±0.01)m0 with the increase of Ps, showing large band nonparabolicity in strained Ge. In contrast to this result, the increase of the mobility with increasing Ps (up to 29 000 cm2/V s) was observed, suggesting that Coulomb scattering played a dominant role in the transport of the Ge channel at low temperatures. In addition, the Dingle ratio of the transport time to the quantum lifetime was found to increase with increasing Ps, which was attributed to the increase of remote impurity scattering with the increase of the doping concentration in MOD SiGe layers

Reduced 1/f noise in p-Si0.3Ge0.7 metamorphic metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor

We have demonstrated reduced 1/f low-frequency noise in sub-µm metamorphic high Ge content p-Si0.3Ge0.7 metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) at 293 K. Three times lower normalized power spectral density (NPSD) SID/ID2 of drain current fluctuations over the 1–100 Hz range at VDS = –50 mV and VG–Vth = –1.5 V was measured for a 0.55 µm effective gate length p-Si0.3Ge0.7 MOSFET compared with a p-Si MOSFET. Performed quantitative analysis clearly demonstrates the importance of carrier number fluctuations and correlated mobility fluctuations (CMFs) components of 1/f noise for p-Si surface channel MOSFETs, and the absence of CMFs for p-Si0.3Ge0.7 buried channel MOSFETs. This explains the reduced NPSD for p-Si0.3Ge0.7 MOSFETs in strong inversion