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The alpha300 Semiconductor Edition is a high-end confocal Raman microscope specifically configured for the chemical imaging of semiconducting materials. It helps researchers accelerate the characterization of crystal quality, strain and doping in their semiconductor samples and wafers.
The microscope’s extended-range scanning stage enables the inspection of up to 12 inch (300 mm) wafers and the acquisition of large-area Raman images. It is equipped with active vibration damping and active focus stabilization to compensate for topographic variation during measurements over large areas or long acquisition times. All microscope components are fully automated, permitting remote-control and the implementation of standard measurement procedures.
Monitoring the quality of wafers is critically important for the semiconductor industry. In order to establish the homogeneity of the material and reveal areas of strain or inhomogeneous doping, the entire area of a wafer must be investigated.
In this example, the complete surface of a 150 mm (6 inch) silicon carbide (SiC) wafer was imaged with Raman microscopy using a 532 nm laser for excitation. The analysis showed that the doping concentration was not homogeneous over the full area. The microscope‘s highly sensitive UHTS 600 spectrometer was able to detect peak shifts below 0.01 cm-1 and could thus reveal stress fields within the wafer.
To obtain a sharp Raman image of the entire wafer, actively keeping the surface in focus was crucial. TrueSurface recorded the wafer’s topography simultaneously with the Raman data and compensated for height variations.
Additionally, a depth scan through an epitaxially overgrown SiC wafer was recorded to visualize the distribution of the different layers.
Sample courtesy of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Systems and Device Technology IISB, Erlangen, Germany.
Confocal Raman imaging is a powerful tool for research and quality control in the semiconductor industry, as it can nondestructively acquire detailed, spatially-resolved chemical information about conventional materials such as silicon (Si), silicon carbide (SiC), gallium nitride (GaN) and gallium arsenide (GaAs) as well as novel 2D materials such as graphene, perovskite, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), tungsten diselenide (WSe2) and other transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) and heterostructures. Raman images visualize the spatial distributions of different materials, as well as material properties such crystallinity, strain, stress or doping. Depth scans can be used to investigate material distribution on substrates and characterize interface layers, and 3D Raman images can be generated to depict inclusions in a sample.
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