Metrology for emerging research materials and devices

The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) [1] identifies a number of potentially enabling device and materials technologies to extend and compliment CMOS. These emerging memory and logic devices employ alternate "states" including 1D charge state, molecular state, polarization, material phase, and spin. The improvement of these materials and devices depends on utilizing existing and new metrology methods to characterize their structure, composition and emerging critical properties at the nanometer scale. The metrology required to characterize nanomaterials, interfaces, and device structures will include existing structural metrology, such as TEM, SEM, and others, as well as metrology to characterize new "state" properties of the materials. The characterization of properties and correlations to nanostructure and composition are critical for these new devices and materials. Characterizing the properties of emerging logic technologies will be very difticult, as an applied stimulus is required to probe dynamic state changes. In many cases, it will be important simultaneously to measure the spatial variation of multiple state properties, such as charge and spin, as a function of time at high frequencies to develop an understanding of the interactions occurring in the materials and at interfaces. Furthermore, the challenge of characterizing interface structure/composition and "state" interactions likely will increase with device scaling. New metrology capabilities are needed to study the static and dynamic properties of potential alternate "state" materials and devices at small dimensions.