Grain size monitor of Al pad is necessary to assure pad quality and electrical performance in IC manufacturing. Currently, the sample is prepared either without pretreatment or with 4.9% HF stain or ion milling before grain size measurement. In this paper, we demonstrate the pretreatment has a pronounced effect on the grain size measurement and the method with ion milling pretreatment shows more reliable results. The mechanism is further discussed.

Failures caused by threshold voltage (Vt) shifts in sub-100nm technology transistors have become very difficult to both analyze and determine the failure mechanism. The failure mechanisms for Vt shifts are typically non-visible for traditional physical analysis methods such as SEM inspection or traditional TEM analysis. This paper demonstrates how nano-probing was used to carefully and fully characterize the Vt shift failure to determine a specific electrical signature for a specific failure mechanism and then with junction stain Transmission Electronic Microscopy (TEM) verify the subtle doping defect affecting the Static Random Access Memory function in the 65nm generation node. Device failure due to a lack of Lightly Dope Drain (LDD) implant induced by an inconspicuous spacer defect was determined to be the root cause of the failure.

Accurate characterization of the nitrogen concentration and distribution in ultra thin nitrided silicon gate oxide plays the same important role as the fabrication technology itself during the development of 90nm and beyond gate oxide manufacturing process. Based on the measurement results of XPS (X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy) as reference, a correlation study was taken between XPS and AES (Auger electron spectroscopy) data in this paper. The study shows that, by optimizing the experiment conditions of AES such as beam energy, beam current and take off angle, and introducing proper corrective factor, AES can be used as a useful and reliable characterization tool during the monitoring measurement of Nitrogen concentration in ultra thin (<2nm) nitrided silicon gate oxide.