HIGH-RESOLUTION AND SENSITIVITY INFRARED TOMOGRAPHY

Laser scanning tomography was proposed some years ago by Ogawa and coworkers as a qualification test for semiconductor materials. From that time on, this technique has been used profitably to obtain images of internal defect distributions in III-V compounds as well as in II-VI compounds or even in silicon. These images especially reveal micro precipitates (e.g. decorated dislocations) distributed in the volume of the bulk material. Previously images sale were adapted to wafer examination (centimeter scale) but it appeared later that a major interest was to improve the resolution down to the microscopical range in order to investigate smaller zones and, above all, thinner sections. Nevertheless there is a limitation in the range of 10 μm for the minimum thickness of LST planes and this drawback prevents the using of this technique in the analysis of thin epilayers or structures. In this paper the emphasis is put on the fundamental and practical limits of the resolution, contrast and detectivity. Special optical arrangements will be suggested to reach the best specifications. Other possible dark field scattering tomographical microscopy methods have been evaluated and will be comparatively discussed in the light of preliminary results. Typical results relative to III-V compounds as well as silicon will be presented and quantitative specifications of the methods will be compared. © 1990.