LAUSR

During past several years, plasma FIB has been established as a routine technique in semiconductor failure analysis and materials science. It offers a wide range of FIB applications like creating big and artefactfree cross sections [1-3], TEM sample preparation [4], 3D tomography [5, 6], integrated circuit delayering [7] and sample preparation for X-ray tomography [8]. However, there are still some limitations of the technique. When compared to Ga FIB, plasma FIB offers significantly faster milling, but its spot size is bigger [1]. This causes worsening of the cross-section quality. Moreover, there are still some applications which require higher beam currents than the maximum ones available now. There is also significantly increased interest in the low beam energy applications. These include e.g. TEM sample final polishing and surface preparation for EBSD. Integrated circuit delayering seems to be another very important low energy application. Due to the shrinkage of semiconductor devices, gentle FIB sputtering needs to replace too destructive mechanical polishing methods. It is possible to access individual layers and to create the surface suitable for nanoprobing, with minimized beam induced damage [7].