Non-contact electrical metrology offers a fast and cost saving monitoring of dielectrics in IC manufacturing process. This corona-Kelvin measuring technique has entered the maturity stage with about 400 tools installed in silicon IC-fabs. We discuss recent advancements that broaden the spectrum of monitoring parameters and enhance the precision of these measurements. We also discuss the current ongoing extension of corona-Kelvin metrology to the micro scale measurement on sites as small as 30µm x 30µm. This opens new possibilities for non-contact electrical testing of product wafers, rather than expensive process monitor wafers. Micro-measurement is illustrated using flash memory ONO structures and corona induced programming and erasing.
Extremely low upper-limit effective surface recombination velocities (S eff.max ) of 5.6 and 7.4 cm/s, respectively, are obtained oñ 1.5 Ω cm n-type and p-type silicon wafers, using silicon nitride (SiN x ) films dynamically deposited in an industrial inline plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) reactor. SiN x films with optimised antireflective properties in air provide an excellent S eff.max of 9.5 cm/s after high-temperature (>800 C) industrial firing. Such low S eff.max values were previously only attainable for SiN x films deposited statically in laboratory reactors or after optimised annealing; however, in our case, the SiN x films were dynamically deposited onto large-area c-Si wafers using a fully industrial reactor and provide excellent surface passivation results both in the as-deposited condition and after industrial-firing, which is a widely used process in the photovoltaic industry. Contactless corona-voltage measurements reveal that these SiN x films contain a relatively high positive charge of (4-8) Â 10 12 cm À2 combined with a relatively low interface defect density of~5 Â 10 11 eV À1 cm À2 .
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