[Spm] PhD opening on conductive AFM

[Thomas Hantschel]

Dear colleages,
Please bring the PhD opening mentioned below on conductive AFM to
the attention of your students. The PhD research will be carried out at the
Interuniversity Microelectronics Center (IMEC) Leuven in Belgium. The
student will work under the supervision of Prof. Wilfried Vandervorst (
vdvorst at imec.be). Interested students can contact us with their CV and a
reference contact.


 PhD Topic: Nanoscale properties of new materials for emerging memory
devices

With the development of new memory devices one needs to develop new
materials with very high permittivity values (high k dielectrica for
capacitors) and dielectrica which show a distinct change in conductivity
depending on previous write/erase pulses. There exists at present a wide
variation in materials (HfO2, NiO,..) which show this behavior. The
mechanism for the change in conductivity are diverse (metal migration,
oxygen migration) but in each case they can be described by the formation of
a conductive filament (on the nm-scale) which promotes this conductivity.
The creation and rupture of this filament is triggered by the write/erase
pulse and occurs on the nm-scale.

Due to their size, these filaments are extremely difficult to be observed
and scanning probe methods (in particular Conductive Atomic Force
Microscopy)  are the only ones providing the require spatial resolution and
the ability to probe the electrical behavior directly.

In this project we will therefore investigate the basic of C-AFM applied on
these materials, optimize the measurements procedures, explore in detail the
information which can be obtained from such measurements, and subsequently
study the filament formation in fundamental detail and determine their
kinetics, ageing, retention and the link to material and fabrication steps
and material modifications during this transformation.  The fundamental work
will be complemented with an assessment of the performance of macroscopic
memory devices.


Thomas Hantschel, Ph.D.
Manager
Materials & Components Analysis

IMEC
Kapeldreef 75
B-3001 Leuven
Belgium
Tel: +32-16-28-1056
Fax: +32-16-28-1576
Email: thomas.hantschel at imec.be
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