ABSTRACT
Electron microscopy (EM) has been playing an extremely critical role in supporting the rapid growth of the microelectronics industry. Everhart et al. first used scanning electron microscopy (SEM) as a method for showing the geometry of integrated circuits (ICs) in 1963 (4). Lander et al. published results of using SEM to study the defects in a diffused p-n junction (5). SEM has also been used to form an electron-beam-induced conductivity (EBIC) image for locating the structure of a device (6). SEM has been widely used in the microelectronics industry for process development, process transfer, in-line process monitoring, defect identification, and physical failure analysis since commercial instruments became available in 1965. Although the most fundamental physical principles of SEM can be found in the textbook written by Goldstein et al. (7), semiconductor-specific applications can be found in the early book published by Holt and Joy in 1989 (8).
