A comparison between mass spectrometry techniques on oxynitrides

The development of materials and processing in microelectronics needs an increasing parallel improvement of the analytical methodologies, required to geve up-to-date answers to the state of the art in this field. Oxynitride is a typical example. This material has replaced thermal silicon oxide as gate insulator due to the properties of good masking against impurity diffusion, together with the excellent dielectric strenght and the better resistance to dielectric breakdown. These properties allow the manufactoring of gate oxide with a thickness below 80 Å. In this work we present the application of analytical methodologies based on mass spectrometry on oxynitrides. In order to develope a complete analytical methodology, the influence of impact energy and incidence angle on the profile quantification in SIMS analyses has been investigated. Also a comparison between ToF-SIMS and SIMS analyses has been performed, to evaluate the applicability of ToF-SIMS depth profiling to this topic