ABSTRACT
The detection of bulk micro-defects in Czochralski-grown silicon (Si) ã100ã wafers has significant importance in wafer quality control. Light Scattering Tomography (LST) is an industry standard technique for this purpose. This optical non-contact metrology requires destructive sample preparation: Samples have to be cleaved into half. One particular feature of the method is a dark field detection arrangement, which is achieved by separating the light detection part (microscope unit) from the illumination. Illumination is applied to the front surface of the sample, and the light scattered off of the defects is collected via the cleaved surface. The technique requires the perpendicularity of the cleaved surface to the front surface, which is fulfilled for Si(100) wafers. However, the nominally cleaved surface for Si(111) wafers is not perpendicular to the front surface but has an angle of 70.5°. This significant difference in cleavage results in the fact that Si(111) wafers cannot be measured by standard LST systems. Fortunately, the standard LST system can be modified by tilting the detection part under a proper angle allowing the measurements of Si(111) samples. In this article, we present this new technique in detail, showing the design and measurement capability of the new system. The measurement results are validated by a direct comparison to standard LST measurements on the same samples after proper sample preparation.
ABSTRACT
The detection of oxygen precipitates, voids, and other defects is critical for semiconductor wafer makers. One of the industry standard techniques for detecting these Bulk Micro-Defects (BMDs) is Semilab's Light Scattering Tomograph (LST) system. In this measurement, unpatterned wafers are nominally cleaved in half. Illumination is applied to the front surface of the sample, and the light scattered off of the defects is collected via the cleaved surface. This technique had been limited to the measurement of unpatterned wafers, but device makers show significant interest in measuring BMD distributions on patterned wafers using scattering-based techniques. A pattern on the surface of the wafer can cause significant scattering, making the standard LST technique unsuitable for this task. We present a solution for patterned wafer BMD measurements by an addition of a low-angle illumination unit to the standard LST system. This new illumination unit focuses the light into the bulk of the wafer via the cleaved surface, which enables measurement on patterned samples. The new system is called "light scattering tomograph enhanced by low-angle illumination." Excellent correlation was found between the detected defect densities obtained by the low-angle and the standard LST illumination mode.
ABSTRACT
For gold nanorods the intrinsic shape-anisotropy offers the prospect of anisotropic assembly, provided that their region-selective surface modification can be realized. Here we developed nanorods with a patchy surface chemistry, featuring positively charged molecules in the tip region and polymer molecules at the sides by careful control of molecule concentrations during ligand exchange. When these patchy nanorods are assembled with small negatively charged spherical particles, electric double layer interaction can direct the assembly of two nanospheres at the opposite ends of the nanorods. The PEG chains promote the selectivity of the procedure. As the size of the nanospheres increases, they start to shift towards the side of the nanorod due to increased van der Waals interaction. When the relative size of the nanospheres is even larger, only a single nanosphere is assembled, but instead of the tip region, they are attached to the side of the nanorods. The apparent cross-over of the region-selectivity can be interpreted in terms of colloidal interactions, i.e. the second spherical particle is excluded due to nanosphere-nanosphere electric double layer repulsion, while the large vdW attraction results in a side positioning of the single adsorbed spherical particle. The results underline the importance of absolute values of the different interaction strengths and length scales in the programmed assembly of patchy nanoscale building blocks.
