Atom Probe Tomography for Semiconducting Materials for Microelectronics and Optoelectronics Applications

Atom probe tomography is one of the highest resolution techniques for elemental analysis at the nanoscale. The 3D data also provides a more complete picture of typical semiconductor structures which is challenging to obtain with other nanoscale characterization techniques. The semiconductor manufacturing industry has largely adopted the atom probe tomography technique, but this hasn’t come without challenges. Typically problems include yield or survivability of the sample through key regions of interest, sample throughput and speed of data acquisition, results matching between instruments, certainty in low-concentration measurements, and time-to-knowledge of critical data in the analysis process.<br/>In this talk, technological and methodological innovations that CAMECA has adopted to support the semiconductor manufacturing industry specific to microelectronics and optoelectronics and tackle some of these challenges will be presented. Examples include automation, instrument matching, simultaneous voltage and laser pulsing, adoption of shorter wavelength lasers, and new reconstruction methods for closer feature fidelity. CAMECA has also initiated a large-scale collaboration effort with Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (imec) as an independent semiconductor research institution to support the goals of applying atom probe to semiconductor manufacturing by creating test structures for semiconductor research.<br/>Atom probe applications for semiconductors, power electronics, and optoelectronics are growing and driven by advances in instrument technology. Higher yield, automated reconstruction and analysis, and the ability to conduct design of experiments studies have all be recently enabled by technology development at CAMECA. In this presentation, we will discuss these developments and how we can enable the atom probe technology community in analysis of semiconductor materials.