| AVS 57th International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Electronic Materials and Processing | Tuesday Sessions |
| Session EM-TuM |
| Session: | Contacts and Transport |
| Presenter: | J.J. Garramone, University at Albany |
| Authors: | J.J. Garramone, University at Albany J.R. Abel, University at Albany I.L. Sitnitsky, University at Albany V.P. LaBella, University at Albany |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Measuring the scattering of electrons in nm-thick structures of metals such as Cu and Ag is both technologically and fundamentally significant. For example, sidewall and grain boundary scattering in nanoscale Cu-metal interconnects dramatically increases the resistance, which is detrimental to device performance. A highly accurate method for studying hot electron transport on the nanometer length scale is ballistic electron emission microscopy (BEEM). BEEM is a three terminal scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) based technique, where electrons tunnel from a STM tip into the grounded metal base of a Schottky diode [1]. The BEEM current is a measurement of the electrons that traverse the metal film and are collected in the semiconductor. Results from BEEM measurements of the hot electron attenuation length of the metal films will be presented. A Fermi liquid based model is utilized to extract the inelastic and elastic contributions to the scattering. The metal films are deposited on H-terminated Si(001) under ultra-high vacuum (UHV). The BEEM measurements are taken at 77K under UHV. Recently we fabricated a contact to the metal layer on the silicon utilizing standard lithography prior to deposition of the metal in UHV [2]. This allowed these BEEM measurements to be performed in situ. The process utilized to fabricate this contact will be presented along with the in situ BEEM results.
References:
[1] L. D. Bell and W. J. Kaiser, Phys. Rev. Lett. 61 2368 (1988)
[2] J. J. Garramone, et al., J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A (in press) (2010)