Both the good and the bad stresses need to be measured, however, if they’re to be controlled by device designers. As the component size of microcircuits has become smaller and smaller, this has become more difficult—particularly since two different and widely used methods of stress measurement have been returning disparate results. One, electron back scattered diffraction (EBSD), deduces underlying stress by observing the patterns of electrons scattered back from the crystal planes. The other, confocal Raman microscopy (CRM), measures minute shifts in the frequency of photons that interact with the atomic bonds in the crystal—shifts that change depending on the amount of stress on the bond. The NIST team used customized, highly sensitive versions of both instruments in a series of comparison measurements to resolve the discrepancies.
The key issue, they found, was depth of penetration of the two techniques. Electron beams sample only the top 20 or 30 nanometers of the material, Cook explained, while the laser-generated photons used in CRM might penetrate as deep as a micrometer or more. The NIST researchers found that by varying the wavelength of the Raman photons and positioning the focus of the microscope they could select the depth of the features measured by the Raman technique—and when the CRM was tuned for the topmost layers of the crystal, the results were in close agreement with EBSD measurements.
The NIST instruments also demonstrate the potential for using the two techniques in combination to make reliable, nanoscale measurements of stress in silicon, which enables device developers to optimize materials and processes. EBSD, although confined to near-surface stress, can make measurements with resolutions as small as 10 nanometers. CRM resolution is about 10 times coarser, but it can return depth profiles of stress. ###
* M.D. Vaudin, Y.B. Gerbig, S.J. Stranick and R.F. Cook. Comparison of nanoscale measurements of strain and stress using electron back scattered diffraction and confocal Raman microscopy. Applied Physics Letters 93, 193116. (2008)
Contact: Michael Baum michael.baum@nist.gov 301-975-2763 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
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