C. Michael Garner

Metrology and Characterization Challenges for Emerging Research Materials and Devices

The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) Emerging Research Materials (ERM) and Emerging Research Devices (ERD) Technology Workgroups have identified materials and devices that could enable continued increases in the density and performance of future integrated circuit (IC) technologies and the challenges that must be overcome; however, this will require significant advances in metrology and characterization to enable progress. New memory devices and beyond CMOS logic devices operate with new state variables (e.g., spin, redox state, etc.) and metrology and characterization techniques are needed to verify their switching mechanisms and scalability, and enable improvement of operation of these devices. Similarly, new materials and processes are needed to enable these new devices. Additionally, characterization is needed to verify that the materials and their interfaces have been fabricated with required quality and performance.

Metrology For Emerging Research Materials And Devices

The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) [1] identifies a number of potentially enabling device and materials technologies to extend and compliment CMOS. These emerging memory and logic devices employ alternate “states” including 1D charge state, molecular state, polarization, material phase, and spin. The improvement of these materials and devices depends on utilizing existing and new metrology methods to characterize their structure, composition and emerging critical properties at the nanometer scale. The metrology required to characterize nanomaterials, interfaces, and device structures will include existing structural metrology, such as TEM, SEM, and others, as well as metrology to characterize new “state” properties of the materials. The characterization of properties and correlations to nanostructure and composition are critical for these new devices and materials. Characterizing the properties of emerging logic technologies will be very difficult, as an applied stimulus is req...