Characterization of VLSI materials

The interest in very large scale integrated circuits and very high speed integrated circuits has placed increasing demands on the quality of the available semiconductor materials. It has also demanded improvements in the characterization techniques in both spatial resolution and detection limits. In this paper the factors influencing the spatial resolution and sensitivity of microanalytical techniques using electron and ion beams will be reviewed. In addition, emerging techniques for analyzing impurity and dopant level concentrations in bulk materials will be discussed. These will be briefly compared to existing bulk analysis techniques in an effort to indicate the method one should use in analyzing for certain constituents.