High-Spacial-Resolution Composition a Nalysis of Micro/Nano Tructures with a Nanoscale Compositional Variation

Abstract

The composition of materials in a micro-/nano-devices plays a key role in determining their mechanical, physical, and chemical properties. Especially, for devices with a compositional change on nanoscale which can often be achieved by point-by-point direct writing mode using a focused ion beam (FIB), electron beam (EB), or laser beam (LB), nanoscale composition analysis remains a big challenge. Here we present a route to realize large-area compostion analysis with nanoscale spatial resolution by using Raman spectroscopy. We experimentally verified the capability of this method to analyze a complex Sn-SnO_x system of a macroscale grayscale mask with nanoscale spatial resolution of compostion.  Further analyses using Auger electron spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and atomic force microscopy indicated that the effectiveness and practicality of our method. This work opens up a way to analyze the composition of a complex system at a nanoscale spatial resolution, and the method can be extended to many other material systems.

Keywords: Raman spectroscopy, nanoscale resolution, composition analysis, large-area