Cubic-like Amorphous Hafnium Oxide: An Ultra-High-k Dielectric for Plastic Electronics (Printed Electronics Europe 2012)

• A new phase of hafnium oxide - cubic-like amorphous hafnium oxide - will be presented

• The material is deposited without substrate heating by a remote plasma sputtering method

• Material properties include a dielectric constant of 30, a resistivity of 10^14 ohm.cm and a breakdown strength of 3MV/cm

• Deposition can be scaled to large areas and is ideally suited to large area plastic electronics where uniformity is critical

Cambridge University Engineering Department, which was rated as a 5* Department in the last Research Assessment Exercise, has been carrying out research in thin film transistors based on amorphous silicon and other inorganic materials for more than ten years. It has a state-of-the-art clean facility within the Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics. This includes 160 m2 of Class 10,000 laboratories which houses a range of deposition systems for producing a diverse range of materials including metallic thin films, amorphous silicon, high-k dielectrics, carbon nanotubes and silicon nanowires. There is a further 140 m2 of Class 1,000 laboratories which includes processing facilities for 1 µm photolithography and nanoparticle-polymer composite processing. Finally, there is 140 m2 of Class 100 laboratories which includes a rapid thermal annealer, deep reactive ion etch system, liquid crystal processing facility, 0.5 µm double-sided mask aligner and an e-beam lithography system.