Analysis of InGaAs Epi Defects by Conductive AFM

As the semiconductor industry continues to push the boundaries of Moore’s law, new device structures and materials are being introduced to increase device speed and lower power consumption. This work uses InGaAs as representative samples to investigate the capability of conductive AFM to image and characterize electrical defects in thin films. As the AFM is a non-destructive technique, the defects may be re-located by complimentary reference metrology techniques. Once the capability of defect detection and characterization of AFM is demonstrated with respect to the reference metrology techniques, conductive AFM is used to characterize the defect density of a set of InGaAs samples grown under varying process stressed epitaxial conditions.