Size effect on Raman measured stress and strain induced phonon shifts in ultra-thin silicon film

The fabrication of complex nano-scale structures, which is a crucial step in the scaling of (nano)electronic devices, often leads to residual stress in the different layers present. This stress gradient can change many of the material properties, leading to changes in device performance, especially in the active part of the transistor, the channel. Measuring, understanding, and, ultimately, controlling the stress fields is hence crucial for many design steps. The level of stress can in principle be measured by micro-Raman spectroscopy. This, however, requires a priori knowledge of the mechanical properties of the material. However, mechanical properties start to deviate from the bulk values when film dimensions become thinner than 5 nm. If this effect is ignored, errors of up to 400% can be introduced in the extracted stress profile. In this work, we illustrate this effect for a range of Si (001) slabs with different silicon film thicknesses, ranging from 5 to 0.7 nm and provide best practices for the proper interpretation of micro-Raman stress measurements.