Resistor Layers

Gate:
Originally SiO2 was the material of choice just because it was so easy to work with on Silicon.
It's easy to grow, just stick it in an oxidation furnace for half an hour and you've got a few
hundred nm of oxide. And the quality of the interface is pretty good, so you didn't have to worry
too much about electrons scattering off interface defects.
As we got down to smaller sizes, we made the gate oxide thinner to increase the gate
capacitance, which makes it easier to drive the transistor. But then when things got really small,
electrons started tunneling right across the oxide, so we couldn't make them any smaller. The
solution was to use a material with a higher dielectric constant, which increased the
capacitance. Which is why Titanium, Halfnium, and Zirconium oxides are sometimes used.

Poly Gate
Polysilicon is the short for polycrystalline silicon. This is a chunk of silicon that has been
purified and melted into place, and has uneven grains unlike the bulk silicon used for substrates,
which has even grains. It differs from purely amorphous silicon in that it still has some structure
to it in the atom level, albeit a bit randomised. Polysilicon gates were favoured because the
material could be easily matched to the SiO2 lattice constant, creating a no-strain, reliable
structure. This structure has fallen into disfavour because it is slow and can toggle
unexpectedly, as in time it alter the shape of the SiO2 layer by itself.

Poly Gate adv over Metal Gate:

One reason for the initial switch to polysilicon is that fabrication processes after
the initial doping required very high temperature annealing. Metal gates would melt
under such conditions whereas polysilicon would not. Using polysilicon allowed for a
one-step process of etching the gates compared to elaborate multi-steps that we see
today in metal-gate processes.

The other reason is that the threshold voltage of the MOSFET inversion layer is
correlated with the work-function difference between the gate and the channel. Using
metal would result in a higher Vt compared to polysilicon since a polysilicon gate would
be of the same or similar material composition as the bulk silicon channel.

Metal Gate
The gate is a metal of some kind, in the case of GaAs it is commonly Au, and the active region is a
doped version of the substrate, AlGaAs or InGaP for instance. They have to be lattice-matched.
Note the depletion region formed that pushes the charge carriers around it.

A hybrid between the MESFET and the MOSFET is the high-k transistor. Because high-k
means high dielectric constant, so we can opt for a thinner gate size and put the contact on
top.

Gate Materials Used:

The first semiconductor gates were made of germanium. Germanium has a lower bandgap, so it
is more efficient. But
is comparatively less stable than
, instead forming a range of
oxides with the formula
.
in comparision is cheaper to produce, and has
astounding adhesion properties.
The dielectric constant of
is around 4, which means that as the dielectric layer grows
thinner, your chance of dielectric breakdown increases much more.
Thus, beginning in the late nineties people started looking at high dielectrics like polysilicon

which has a of 11.7, and

which has a of 25.
There is currently ongoing research into using strain engineered perovskite materials like
which have s in the thousands. Strain engineering is needed both for lattice
matching, and to engineer .
Since the 1960s, we have spent billions of dollars researching and improving the
interface. It is this research that underpins Moore's law. But remember, I told you at the
beginning that germanium is better for many applications. The widescale acceptance of Si was
based on the great match between the
interface. With that dielectric now gone, we
are again looking at germanium, and integrating it into electronics.