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Innovative production of 3D nanochips

27.07.2013

New microscopy technology will facilitate the development and control of the production of XNUMXD semiconductor chips.

Scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have upgraded the optical microscopy technology they developed several years ago and adapted it to observe nano-sized objects, which allows them to control the production of elements of three-dimensional semiconductor chips of a new generation. With the help of this technology, called TSOM (Through-Focus Scanning Optical Micr), one can not only examine the nanoscale components of chips, which until recently were two-dimensional structures, but also determine differences in their shapes and sizes with a sufficiently high accuracy, which is required for carrying out technological control.

New generations of semiconductor chips are composed of three-dimensional elements that are superimposed on each other. For the correct and reliable operation of the chip as a whole, it is required that all components have the correct shape and strictly specified dimensions. Existing methods of microscopy - electron, atomic force and others - can provide control of the shape and size of chip elements, but they do it extremely slowly, with the risk of damaging the fragile structure of the chip, and they are also extremely expensive. And the use of optical microscopy methods is limited by the fact that the dimensions of the chip elements are much smaller than half the wavelength of visible light (250 nm for green light), so an optical microscope cannot physically see such small objects.

TSOM technology allows you to see optically objects that are approximately 10 nm in size, and even smaller in the future. The TSOM method uses a conventional optical microscope that takes not one, but many defocused XNUMXD images of an object of interest from multiple viewpoints. Using the brightness changes from these out-of-focus shots, the computer calculates light gradients and defines the boundaries of the objects being shot, thus creating the resulting three-dimensional image.

The images obtained using the TSOM method are somewhat abstract, but the details that are visible on them make it possible to determine differences in the shapes and sizes of semiconductor chip components with a fairly high accuracy.

"Our research has shown that with TSOM, we can view elements as small as 10 nm, which is enough to control semiconductor manufacturing processes for the next decade," says Ravikiran Attota, a scientist at NIST. TSOM technology can be used not only in the electronics industry, but also in other industries, in science and everywhere where it is necessary to analyze and control the shapes of tiny three-dimensional objects."

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