![]() And while super-resolution optical microscopy can resolve below the Abbe limit, it’s generally not used in industrial settings due to its complexity.Įlectron microscopes are based on a key insight from Louis deBroglie: “A beam of electrons traveling in a vacuum behaves as a form of radiation of very short wavelength.” Due to these shorter wavelengths, electron microscopes can resolve to about 0.1 nm, making them the ideal instruments to image leading-edge nodes. What should be an edge appears as a blur, making it impossible to distinguish one object from another. Below the Abbe diffraction limit of about 200nm, optical microscopes essentially suffer from astigmatism. What the industry calls e-beam is actually a catch-all term for several types of electron microscopy. There are now several different kinds of e-beams in the market, each evolving to better balance speed, resolution, and specific application. 1: E-beam inspection of potential defects. “Defects reported by our broadband plasma optical inspectors are reviewed on an e-beam tool to identify the defect type captured,” said Satya Kurada, vice president of marketing at KLA.įig. Still as transistor densities increase and devices become more heterogeneous, the role of e-beam is growing. “They are complementary applications, not competing applications,” said Bob Johnson, an analyst at Gartner. But it is being supplemented by e-beam for R&D and failure analysis, and technology such as atomic-force microscopy (AFM) for looking deep into chips. In general, optical remains the workhorse because of its high throughput, and is likely to remain so for years to come. Increasingly, though, other types of inspection that were considered too slow or too costly are being added into the mix. The perpetual march toward smaller features, coupled with growing demand for better reliability over longer chip lifetimes, has elevated inspection from a relatively obscure but necessary technology into one of the most critical tools in fab and packaging houses.įor years, inspection had been framed as a battle between e-beam and optical microscopy.
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