Author Correction: Enhancing doping contrast and optimising quantification in the scanning electron microscope by surface treatment and Fermi level pinning.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Unravelling new principles of site-selective doping contrast in the dual-beam focused ion beam/scanning electron microscope.

Doping contrast using the secondary electron (SE) signal in the scanning electron microscope (SEM) can satisfy the International Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) requisites for quantitative dopant profiling of next-generation integrated circuits and devices, but only if adopting a site-selective specimen preparation procedure. In this study, site-specific dopant profiling was performed on the trench side-wall cut by a 30-kV Ga focused ion beam (FIB) into silicon p-n junction specimens and milled using successively lower voltages in the dual-beam FIB/SEM. Although depositing the protective platinum strap on the surface effectively controls 'curtaining' effects at low final milling voltages, significantly reduced doping contrast from the side-wall compared to that from a cleaved surface subjected to the same ion-beam energy is ascribed to the material affected by a previous milling step, as well as the dissimilar geometries of milling and imaging.

Enhancing doping contrast and optimising quantification in the scanning electron microscope by surface treatment and Fermi level pinning.

Recent advances in two-dimensional dopant profiling in the scanning electron microscope have enabled a high throughput, non-contact process diagnostics and failure analysis solution for integrated device manufacturing. The routine (electro)chemical etch processes to obtain contamination-free, hydrogen-terminated silicon surfaces is industrially important in ULSI microfabrication, though doping contrast, which is the basis for quantitative dopant profiling, will be strongly altered. We show herein that ammonium-fluoride treatment not only enabled doping contrast to be differentiated mainly by surface band-bending, but it enhanced the quality of linear quantitative calibration through simple univariate analysis for SE energies as low as 1 eV.

Fermi level pinning characterisation on ammonium fluoride-treated surfaces of silicon by energy-filtered doping contrast in the scanning electron microscope.

Two-dimensional dopant profiling using the secondary electron (SE) signal in the scanning electron microscope (SEM) is a technique gaining impulse for its ability to enable rapid and contactless low-cost diagnostics for integrated device manufacturing. The basis is doping contrast from electrical p-n junctions, which can be influenced by wet-chemical processing methods typically adopted in ULSI technology. This paper describes the results of doping contrast studies by energy-filtering in the SEM from silicon p-n junction specimens that were etched in ammonium fluoride solution.

Dopant profiling based on scanning electron and helium ion microscopy.

In this paper, we evaluate and compare doping contrast generated inside the scanning electron microscope (SEM) and scanning helium ion microscope (SHIM). Specialised energy-filtering techniques are often required to produce strong doping contrast to map donor distributions using the secondary electron (SE) signal in the SEM. However, strong doping contrast can be obtained from n-type regions in the SHIM, even without energy-filtering.