Characteristics of cross-sectional atom probe analysis on semiconductor structures

The laser-assisted Atom Probe has been proposed as a metrology tool for next generation semiconductor technologies requiring sub-nm spatial resolution. In order to assess its potential for the analysis of three-dimensional semiconductor structures like FinFETs, we have studied the Atom Probes lateral resolution on a silicon, silicon–germanium multilayer structure. We find that the interactions of the laser with the semiconductor materials in the sample distort the sample surface. This results in transient errors of the measured dimensions of the structure. The deformation of the sample furthermore leads to a degradation of the lateral resolution. In the experiments presented in this paper, the Atom Probe reaches a lateral resolution of 1-1.8 nm/decade. In this paper we will discuss the reasons for the distortions of the tip and demonstrate that with the present state of data reconstruction severe quantification errors limit its applicability for the quantitative analysis of heterogeneous semiconductor structures. Our experiments show that reconstruction algorithms taking into account the time dependent nanostructure of the tip shape are required to arrive at accurate results.

Research highlights
► We investigate the shape of a heterogeneous ion-emitter in a laser-assisted Atom Probe.
► We observe transient emitter shape variations.
► Our data show that a better understanding of the emitter tip interaction is vital to interpret analysis results.