Electron Channeling Contrast Imaging: Rapid Characterization of Semiconductors

For semiconductor technologies, achievement of their ultimate potential depends greatly upon the ability to fully harness and exploit their advanced properties, which in turn depends on understanding these properties and their limiters. As such, the detailed characterization and analysis of advanced semiconductor materials and structures is paramount for the elucidation of these fundamental structure-property relationships. With respect to the investigation of microto nano-scale features, which greatly impact the larger scale (i.e. bulkand device-level) properties of most materials systems, electron microscopy is well-known to provide the kind of important, detailed information that no other class of techniques can match. Characterization of this sort is provides vital feedback into ongoing and future materials and device design, synthesis, and test efforts. To this end, the research described herein utilizes an emerging electron microscopy technique, electron channeling contrast imaging (ECCI), for the rapid microstructural characterization epitaxial semiconductor materials as applied toward three novel applications: imaging dislocations (crystalline defects) at a lattice-mismatched interface, visualization of phase separation within an unstable alloy, and investigating embedded (subsurface) epitaxial quantum dots (QD). Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) has historically been the go-to method used for the detailed microstructural characterization of nearly all materials systems, including the epitaxial semiconductor materials of interest here, as it has the necessary resolution and sensitivity to accurately study such systems. However, sample preparation for TEM work can be