Low-temperature vanadium dioxide for CMOS integration and flexible polyimide applications

Abstract

Vanadium dioxide (VO₂) is a popular phase-transition material with broad applications ranging from thermal management in smart windows to neuromorphic computing. Currently, VO₂ thin films are usually fabricated at high temperatures, making them incompatible in forming on top of CMOS and flexible polyimide substrates. This study explores a low-temperature VO₂ thin film formation approach that combines atomic layer deposition (ALD) with a post-deposition anneal. With systematic material characterizations, we clearly demonstrate high-quality VO₂ film formation on Si substrates at a significantly reduced annealing temperature of 300 °C. Further reducing the annealing temperature to 250 oC is shown to lead to insufficient VO₂ crystallization whilst elevating the temperature to 400 oC results in overoxidation into V₂O₅. We implement our method on polyimide substrates and demonstrate that the high-quality phase transition is indeed preserved. This work demonstrates the ability of low-temperature formation of VO₂ thin films, and it will accelerate the adoption of VO₂ in emerging electronic devices as well as photonic applications.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Yuxin Du: orcid.org/0009-0007-7189-803X

ORCID for Cornelis H. (Kees) De Groot: orcid.org/0000-0002-3850-7101

ORCID for Otto L. Muskens: orcid.org/0000-0003-0693-5504

ORCID for Xu Fang: orcid.org/0000-0003-1735-2654

ORCID for Kai Sun: orcid.org/0000-0001-6807-6253

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