S. Schmitz and H. Schoeder

Mixed oxide thin film insulators are promising candidates to replace SiO2/SiNx in future ultra-low-scale integrated Gbit-DRAM chips, e.g. as dielectric in capacitors of memory cells and as gate oxide in MOSFETs. Although some materials, e.g. (BaxSrl-x)TiO3 (BST), have properties suitable for these applications, the underlying mechanisms of these properties are often less well understood. We report on a new "probe station", an apparatus specialized for the electrical characterization of metallized thin oxide films with the ability of a wide variation of external parameters and of measurements with high resolution necessary for mechanistic studies. First results on leakage currents are compared to published data and the need for additional experimental and theoretical work is demonstrated by the attempt to fit these data to commonly applied models.