Quantitative Applications of SIMS in Microelectronics

The ability of SIMS to provide depth profiles with less than ppm detection sensitivity while maintaining excellent depth resolution makes SIMS indispensable to the characterization of materials and structures used in the semiconductor industry. Semiconductor devices operate correctly only if the intended or designed concentration profiles of intentionally added impurities are present in the intended locations, and certain other impurities are absent. For today's high performance devices, SIMS is required to measure dopant atom density profiles with accuracy with +-20% in many cases, and contaminant atom densities within a factor of two.