LAUSR

Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and/or electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) in scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) is very popular for analysis of semiconductor devices, since we require chemical information of them other than their shapes and dimensions. However, it requires more electron dose onto a sample than that of imaging due to small signal intensity. It is unavoidable that the sample lamella suffers the electron beam damage from electrons of an STEM probe in EDS and/or EELS analysis. The damage could be categorized into two types, one is structure deformation of sample and the other is beam drilling caused from etching and/or migration of sample atoms [1]. The latter is crucial for elemental analysis, since it significantly affect to results of compositional and/or quantitative chemical analyses. Several results on the beam drilling effect have been reported so far [2, 3]. In this paper, we report beam drilling of Si crystal which depends on accelerating voltage and electron probe current using EDS, because it could be a crucial problem and should be avoided for long time or high magnification analysis.