An industrial SR TXRF facility at ESRF

A TXRF industrial facility for the mapping of trace impurities on the surface of 300 mm Silicon wafers is presently under construction at the ESRF, European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, in Grenoble (France) and its commissioning phase will start at the end of 1998. The elements to be detected range from Na to Hg with a target routine detection limit of 10(8) atoms /cm(2). The facility is the result of a collaboration between the ESRF and some of the major European semiconductor companies in the framework of the MEDEA consortium. Preliminary experiments at ESRF reached a detection limit of 1.7x10(8) for Ni atoms (17 fg) in not optimised experimental conditions. The facility will improve the detection limit by a factor of 50. However, this gain in sensitivity will be traded in the possibility of mapping the surface of 300 mm wafer with a resolution of 500 pixels and a throughput of three wafers/h. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.