TEM characterization of nickel silicide process

The advent of 65 nm technology makes nickel silicide finally come into the picture due to its relatively low electrical resistance and less silicon consumption. To accurately control the nickel silicide thickness and obtain the low resistance mono-silicide (NiSi) phase, characterization of each sicilidation process step is very important. This paper applies analytical TEM to characterize the nickel silicidation process. Different imaging technologies are compared and the results show that Z-contrast STEM imaging is a very good technique for the identification of different compositional layers and imaging processing also plays a very important role for image quality improvement.