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EMPIR project works on early identification of defects in European semiconductor manufacturing

Close-up of microchip on a motherboard

Consumer electronics, innovative quantum technologies, and Internet of Things applications all rely on semiconductors, where reliable characterisation of electrical properties at the nanoscale is essential for European innovation and competitiveness. The measurement of these properties allows the evaluation of critical parameters used to define the performance of electronic materials and components.

The aim of completed EMPIR project Electrical nanoscale metrology in industry (20IND12, Elena) was to make such measurements traceable for the first time, with stated uncertainties. Cost effective instrumentation and open-source software for robust modelling were developed and tested as well as the first “out of lab” reference standards from DC to GHz. Solid calibration methods and good practice guides using simplified uncertainty budgets were produced.

The project has successfully improved the user-friendly uncertainty quantification for the electrical measurements at the nanoscale in the industrial environment. The design of calibration standards was improved, and new reference standards for DC resistance / current as well as high frequency impedance were introduced and quantified. New ways of determining the properties of standard samples like ellipsometry were evaluated.

Good Practice Guides

During the project good practice guides for the calibration and uncertainty quantification were written and are available in open access on the Elena website:

Good practice guide for calibrated resistance and current measurements using conductive probe atomic force microscopy (C-AFM)
Good practice guide for calibrated admittance measurements using scanning microwave microscopy (SMM)

Standards and regulatory documents

All data, procedures, and example uncertainty data from the project are included in standards and two IEC standards projects were started during this project with input from the consortium:

Commercialisation

Industrial manufacturers (including Bruker, CSI, NanoSurf, Park Systems) have tested hybrid calibration samples developed in this project with their own conductive atomic force microscopes and found these samples good for their calibration. Following their feedback and further measurements performed by some partners, a new type of calibration sample has been designed and fabricated. Now commercialised by LNE, they enable verification of the accuracy of C-AFM measurements over expanded resistance and current ranges from 1 kΩ to 10 TΩ and from 10 fA to 10 µA. Once calibrated, these reference samples allow the user to get highly accurate calibrated C-AFM over the same resistance and current ranges. As main features, the samples are fitted with two sets of parallel platinum electrodes enabling to cover in a single scan line two resistance or current ranges and with three “Short circuit” (SC) electrodes enabling in situ tip resistance measurements. It should be noted that, as part of the project, the first hybrid calibration samples enabled one of the partners to validate the performance of a wide-range current measuring device (WiCMD) that it had developed and for which a commercialisation process is underway.

Industrial manufacturer MC2 now has the improved capacitance calibration kits for scanning microwave microscopes which were developed during this project commercially available. These new calibration kits cover a wider capacitance range and present a twofold improvement in terms of total uncertainty which is now ranging from 1.9% (300 aF) to 1.2% (39 fF). This improvement is mainly due to the reduction in the uncertainty associated with the dimensional measurements and the reduction in the influence of depletion capacitance on the total uncertainty.

In addition, METAS provides a complete set of standards on a commercial basis, this set including capacitance in the fF range, resistance and inductance up to 960 Ω and 1.15 nH.

The commercialisation of the Software Defined Radio developed by one partner in this project is ongoing with an industrial manufacturer.

Different models of SMMs with the electronics tested in this EMPIR project are now available from the company Nanosurf.

Project coordinator François Piquemal from LNE said

‘During this project, we have enjoyed close, efficient and enthusiast collaboration within the consortium and benefited from a fruitful interaction with stakeholders, manufacturers and industry collaborators. Thanks to this, the project has achieved landmark progress in the broader use of nanoscale electrical measurements by filling the gap of a missing calibration and traceability infrastructure, thus, moving away from poorly reproducible and relatively inaccurate measurements. The project has demonstrated that traceable and quantifiable measurements with well-defined calibration procedures can be performed using C-AFM and SMM techniques by users outside a metrology laboratory.

We expect that the project achievements will contribute to supporting European innovation and competitiveness in semiconductor industry.’

This EMPIR project is co-funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the EMPIR Participating States.

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