Transmission electron microscopy for the semi-conductor industry

During the last 5 years, semi-conductor industry has dramatically enhanced the device performance by continuously introducing new technologies and aggressively scaling down the feature sizes. During the progress, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) has played a very important role in the process development, manufacture controlling, and failure analysis. On the other hand, the development of TEM techniques for the semi-conductor devices, especially the sample preparation technique, has changed the entire aspect of the TEM. TEM is no longer a name heard only in research institutes and universities. It becomes so important for semi-conductor industry that TEM are treated as the most reliable resource for process evaluation and failure analysis and that TEM images are often used as one of the most powerful evidence for the patent infringement trial. In this paper, the author reviews the great challenges that electron microscopist has been facing from the semi-conductor industry and presents TEM results that illustrate the utilization of various TEM techniques to meet the challenges. To emphasize the unique ability of TEM, application of the precision TEM technique is mentioned in detail. A new three-dimensional TEM technique is also discussed. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.