Electronic Materials and Devices

The Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) technique plays an essential role in the semiconductor industry. The excellent depth resolution, good lateral resolution and trace sensitivity of SIMS-based techniques mean that they are regularly used from early-stage technology development to performance optimisation or diagnosis of reliability issues post-production. However, SIMS has to make significant evolution to meet a variety of new analytical needs. The common issues addressed for microelectronic materials and devices can still be globally defined as the profiling and quantification of both matrix elements and dopants, diffusion control and interlayer reactions. If this historical mission assigned to SIMS is still valid, it has to now adjust to the increasing variety of materials as well as to the heterogeneity and complexity of final devices. This has led to creative solutions and developments in the SIMS technique, both for analytical protocols and instrumentation. We will illustrate our point with representative cases depicting current trends and advances in the field. In particular, we will focus on situations where the development and use of new approaches is mandatory, such as the analysis of new (i.e. other than silicon-based) inorganic structures, organic materials for electronics and focused ion beam (FIB)-SIMS tomography.