Metal thin films have been widely used as conductors in semiconductor devices for several decades. However, the resistivity of metal thin films such as Cu and TiN increases substantially (>1000%) as they become thinner (<10 nm) when using high-density integration to improve device performance. In this study, the resistivities of MAX-phase V2AlC films grown on sapphire substrates exhibited a significantly weaker dependence on the film thickness than conventional metal films that resulted in a resistivity increase of only 30%, as the V2AlC film thickness decreased from approximately 45 to 5 nm. The resistivity was almost identical for film thicknesses of 10-50 nm. The small change in the resistivity of V2AlC films with decreasing film thickness originated from the highly ordered crystalline quality and a small electron mean free path (11-13.6 nm). Thus, MAX-phase thin films have great potential for advanced metal technology applications to overcome the current scaling limitations of semiconductor devices.
S.W.L. was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning (no. NRF-2019R1C1C1008577) and the Basic Research Laboratory project of the Korean Government (MSIP) (no. NRF-2020R1A4A1018935). This work was also supported by the \u201cHuman Resources Program in Energy Technology\u201d of the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP), with a grant of financial resources from the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy, Republic of Korea (no. 20184030202220). We would like to thank K. H. Kim (SAIT) for the XRD analysis and J. B. Park (SAIT) for the TEM measurements. We would also like to thank Y. N. Ham and S. Heo (SAIT) for composition analysis.
