NSF Award
0078580
This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will design, fabricate and test a<br/>prototype gas-cluster ion-beam (GCIB) sputtering tool for depth profiles with<br/>monolayer-specific surface analysis of thin films. Applications will be to multilayer<br/>thin films of key importance in the microelectronics industries including semiconductors,<br/>metals in magnetic sensors, and dielectrics in photonic and micro-optical devices. The<br/>sputtering tool is expected to meet aggressive performance specifications including depth<br/>resolution of less than 1 nm in conjunction with mass spectrometry. This GCIB tool will<br/>be designed particularly for in-situ sputtering with surface-analytical instruments<br/>including the secondary-ion mass spectrometer (SIMS), the Auger electron spectrometer<br/>(AES) and the x-ray photoelectron spectrometer (XPS). The overriding motivation is the<br/>critical need in microelectronics for techniques to obtain accurate sputter depth<br/>measurements. The Phase-I effort demonstrated those GCIB methods with argon clusters<br/>sputter with near-atomic smoothness, high depth resolution and high secondary-ion yields.<br/>Minor instrumental design issues limited the cluster beam exposure uniformity and this<br/>artificially limited the average depth resolution measured. Straightforward engineering<br/>solutions are well known and are expected to yield improvements in Phase II that will<br/>provide depth resolution of well below 1 nm.<br/><br/>The proposed technology will enable analysis of next-generation microelectronics devices<br/>having much thinner films. Epion is the first and only to manufacture GCIB systems. The<br/>tool to be prototyped will enable and have a wide applicability to many areas of the<br/>electronic materials processing and manufacturing industry.
