| As silicon devices shrink further beyond the 65 nm technology node, strain is increasingly important for the fabrication and operation of nano-devices. According to the latest International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, however, the detection and mapping of strain at the required nanometer spatial resolution has yet to be achieved. The project is to evaluate the convergent-beam electron diffraction (CBED) technique in a transmission electron microscope (TEM) as a nanoscale strain metrology. In this work, by using energy-filtered CBED under scanning TEM (STEM) mode, we have successfully measured strain in two types of sub-100 nm semiconductor structures: 90 nm node and 65 nm node shallow trench isolation (STI) structures, and a 65 nm node locally strained p-type metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (P-MOSFET, or PMOS) featuring SiGe source and drain (S/D).; In the 90 nm STI structures, the strain is generally less than 0.1%. Nevertheless, CBED is sensitive enough to tell the strain difference in two 90 nm STI structures with different oxide trench filling conditions. In the 65 nm STI structure, the strain tensors at different positions around the oxide trench filling are measured. The experimental results are compared with finite element modeling based on isotropic elasticity theory. A large discrepancy is found between experiments and simulation, which suggests that a more sophisticated model is necessary for accurate modeling, and more importantly that CBED strain measurements can be used to check the applicability of models at nanometer scale.; In the 65 nm node uniaxially strained PMOS, the lattice parameters of silicon at a distance of 25 nm to 55nm below the gate are measured. It is found that at 25 below the gate, the major stress component, 1.1 GPa, is compressive along the source-drain axis. It is also noticed that in the strained silicon area, all three diagonal components of the strain tensor are compressive. Thus the CBED strain measurements suggest that a rheological model, rather than elastic models used in most research articles, is required for modeling the strain profile in the highly strained region with plastic behaviors. At SID, the SiGe lattice parameters are also measured. It is found that the epitaxial SiGe no longer assumes cubic crystal structure as a result of stress.; Several issues related to CBED strain measurements, including the fundamental limitations for CBED, the instrumentation, the software for chi2 -fitting of lattice parameters, spontaneous strain relaxation in a thin TEM sample and the splitting of high-order Laue zone lines in a CBED pattern, precision sample preparation by focused ion beam, and the alignment for STEM, are described in this dissertation. |
