Resolution of non-destructive imaging by controlled acceleration voltage in scanning electron microscopy

Kelvin Elphick; Bernardus D Aditya; Jiaqi Wu; Michihiro Ohta; Atsufumi Hirohata

doi:10.1016/j.ultramic.2021.113316

Resolution of non-destructive imaging by controlled acceleration voltage in scanning electron microscopy

Ultramicroscopy. 2021 Sep:228:113316. doi: 10.1016/j.ultramic.2021.113316. Epub 2021 May 16.

Authors

Kelvin Elphick¹, Bernardus D Aditya², Jiaqi Wu², Michihiro Ohta³, Atsufumi Hirohata⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electronic Engineering, University of York, York YO10 5DD, United Kingdom; Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
² Department of Material Science and Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong; Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
³ Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong; Department of Electrical Engineering, Nagaoka University of Technology, Nagaoka 940-2118, Japan.
⁴ Department of Electronic Engineering, University of York, York YO10 5DD, United Kingdom; Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Electronic address: atsufumi.hirohata@york.ac.uk.

PMID: 34119806
DOI: 10.1016/j.ultramic.2021.113316

Abstract

A new method of non-destructive sub-surface interfacial characterisation has been developed recently, which can be useful for quality assurance of a buried interface in nanoelectronic devices, such as magnetic random access memory. Since the cell size of these devices have been reducing their sizes, it is important to evaluate the resolution of the non-destructive imaging. A sub nanometric layer of different materials such as W and Pt was grown underneath a capping layer with controlled thickness for the evaluation of their sizes in this study. This provides systematic experimental data to show that the technique is capable to resolve down to approximately 2 nm in the plane, which is sufficient for the device imaging.