Fabrication and characterization of a metal nanocrystal memory using molecular beam epitaxy

Recently, single and few electron devices have attracted a lot of attention due to their advantages when compared to the conventional DRAM or Flash memories. There is also a great effort to replace the silicon oxide (SiO2) with materials of high dielectric constant that could allow the further downscaling of MOSFET devices. In this work, initially we study the hafnium oxide (HfO2) deposition on thin SiO2. We fabricate a HfO2 layer, with good dielectric properties and with high dielectric constant. Then, we fabricate a novel MOS memory device with platinum (Pt) nanoparticles embedded in the HfO2/SiO2 interface.