LA-ICP-MS and LIBS: Analytical Techniques for Lateral Resolved Elemental Analysis applied to Corrosion Studies in Semiconductor Devices

摘要

Trace amounts of contaminations are often responsible for corrosion and material alteration ofsemiconductor devices under harsh environmental conditions.For a better understanding of these corrosion mechanisms, the accurate analysis of the distributionand diffusion profiles of these contaminations within the device is viable. However, these analyticalmeasurements often bring conventional analytical techniques used in the semiconductor industryto their limits.To overcome these limitations two laser assisted techniques, namely Laser ablation-Inductivelycoupled plasma-Mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and Laser induced breakdown spectroscopy(LIBS), were used for imaging and depth profiling of diffusing elemental species in semiconductordevices.LA-ICP-MS and LIBS are analytical techniques which are mainly used to determine elementalcomposition of samples. These two complementary analytical techniques can provide lateralanalysis of sample areas up to cm~2 with lateral resolution in the range of several μm up to somehundred μm. Additionally analysis of depth-profiles up to several mm are possible in reasonabletimes. LA-ICP-MS and LIBS offers elemental analysis for all elements of the periodic table forconcentrations in the ng/g-mg/g rangeIn this work, different use cases are presented where a LA-ICP-MS/LIBS system was applied toinvestigate analytical challenges of the semiconductor industry.