Circuit Editing and Failure Analysis Applications using a Three-Ion-Beam (Ga, He and Ne) System and Gas Injection System (GIS)

Abstract

The focused ion beam (FIB) is widely used in semiconductor industries for circuit editing (CE), failure analysis (FA) and nanofabrication. Gallium FIB is most developed for CE and FA for feature size >10 nm. In general, after the FIB processing, the structural characterization is performed using SEM. A gas injection system (GIS) is integrated into a FIB or SEM microscope system to mill or deposit the materials in electron or ion induced processing in CE and FA. Ga FIB induced processing cannot fabricate small enough metal or insulator nanostructures to meet the shrinkage of feature size in current semiconductor processing. In the Zeiss NanoFab system, the Ga ion beam is used to perform the fast and large scale milling, and the helium ion beam is used to obtain the high resolution images. In addition, the neon ion beam is used to mill or assist deposition of smaller functional structures. Appropriate precursors for ion induced etching or deposition are introduced via an integrated GIS. In this paper we evaluate applications in CE and FA using a combination of three different focused ion beams.