Traditional instrumentation suffers from one fundamental issue: How to cover the dimensional range of a fully integrated circuit down to the nanometer range (or even atomic scale) of single devices and how to integrate an adequate navigation system.
To meet these requirements, over the past 6 years we have being advancing and establishing a new approach to integrate state-of-the-art SPM technology with high resolution electron microscopy and spectroscopy: (1) Four independent STMs for nano-probing and imaging; (2) SEM for rapid probe navigation and to bridge dimensions from the mm scale down to the nanometer range (3) Position-readout of sample and probes. Combining different surface analysis methods at the very same sample area to gain complementary information by SEM and SAM for chemical mapping.
Beyond that, sophisticated analysis technology is strongly enmeshed in the complex production process of nano-devices under ultra clean UHV conditions. This fact requires integrated UHV system solutions incorporating deposition techniques such as MBE, CVD, PLD as well as structuring techniques ranging from FIB and EBL down to atomic scale manipulation using SPM. |
