The Laser Molecular Beam Epitaxy (Laser-MBE) technique is an emerging technology, it has combined advantages of traditional thermal MBE high vacuum and of PLD for high melting materials, and it has become a very promising method to prepare high quality, epitaxial grown thin films for microelectronic and optical devices. The L-MBE can deposit thin films with surface smoothness in atomic scale, especially suitable for high melting temperature ceramics and multi-component solids, such as semiconductors, high-Tc superconductors, optical crystals, electro-optical films, ferroelectric and ferromagnetic materials. It has been very successful and extremely useful for synthesis of artificial-layered super-lattice oxides, ceramics and component materials, to open the possibility of oxide electronics.

In this presentation, high-k gate dielectric ultrathin films using Laser MBE will be presented. With continuous scaling down, semiconductor industry, which has annual US$300 billions sales, has approach face tremendous challenges, and one of the focus issues is the using alternative/high-k gate dielectric to replace the currently used SiO2, as rolled out by the International SEMITECH Technology Roadmap for the sub-0.1 m CMOS technology. 65 nm technology has been in mass production, Intel has used high-k/metal technology for its 45 nm production, and 32 nm and 22 nm technologies, all of which high-k gate dielectrics are employed. Our research work on high-k by L-MBE has generated excellent results, such as equivalent thickness to SiO2 (EOT) of ~ 0.95 nm, extra small leakage current density of ~ 4 orders lower than that of same EOT of SiO2, high breakdown field strength of larger than 10 MV/cm, almost no hysteresis in C-V measurement, and large time-dependent-dielectric-breakdown (TDDB). The breakdown mechanism and conduction mechanism of these high-k gate dielectric ultrathin films will also discussed.

Recently, multi-functional oxide and ceramic thin films have attracted intensive research interests and attention, and impressive progress has been made in such artificially-designed and grown ultrathin films and super-lattices: for instance, the lager shift of ferroelectric transition temperature in bulk SrTiO3 of ~ 70K up to high than room temperature in ultrathin strained SrTiO3 film; large thermoelectric Seebeck effect in alternative Nb doped SrTiO3 unit cell stacks; co-existence of ferroelectromagnetism; very large 2 dimensional electronic gas and HEMT device, etc. Our most recent research works on multi-functional super-lattices will be presented and discussed.