Bevel depth profiling by high-spatial-resolution sputtered neutral mass spectrometry with laser postionization

Secondary-ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) sputter depth profiling is used for the quantitative depth profile analysis of impurities. However, SIMS suffers from a large quantitative uncertainty and depth-scale uncertainty at the interfaces of heteromultilayers and in the near-surface region, because the secondary ion yield and sputtering yield are significantly influenced by matrix effects and accumulation effects of the primary ion. In this paper, the authors report on the development of a new depth profiling method with good depth-scale accuracy and low matrix effects to overcome these problems. This was achieved through the combination of high-spatial-resolution bevel depth profiling and sputtered neutral mass spectrometry with laser postionization (laser-SNMS). The sample used to evaluate this new bevel depth profiling method was a silicon on insulator wafer obtained using the separation by implantation of oxygen technique and implanted with boron. Depth profiles were obtained using both SIMS and laser-SNMS and evaluated by comparison with the stopping and range of ions in matter (SRIM) simulation. Although both methods afforded quite good depth resolutions, in SIMS the secondary ion signal intensity for boron was amplified by the influence of the matrix effect and showed a discontinuous profile shape at the interfaces, whereas the profile for boron obtained using laser-SNMS was consistent with the SRIM results and exhibited high continuity. By using a combination of the bevel depth profiling method and laser-SNMS method, it was confirmed that an easy-to-analyze depth profile could be obtained for the dopant concentration in multilayer samples, which is difficult to obtain using the conventional SIMS method.