Study of Dielectric Degradation Using Self-Sensing and Optical Conductive Probes.

Silicon Dioxide is a well-established material system for the study of dielectric degradation under external stress from an electrical field. With local probing on a nanometer scale using conductive atomic force microscopy, leakage spots have often been reported before in the literature, opening a new pathway for the analysis of physical processes in dielectric degradation. However, the time-dependent evolution of physical shape, size, and electronic leakage in the spots has not been studied yet in combination with simulation data of electronic transport models. In addition, with the advent of novel atomic force microscope hardware, including contact-based self-sensing probes, the ability to perform such investigations in thin dielectrics with self-sensing Conductive Atomic Force Microscopy can offer new opportunities to characterize reliability in electronic devices. Therefore, this work reports on the use of physics-based simulation software to feed in data from Conductive Atomic Force Microscopy experiments to monitor the evolution of conductive spots under the effect of voltage stress-induced degradation. The investigation quantified the apparent growth of conductive leakage spots in multiple scan cycles attributed to the generation of the defects with time, through the simulation. As for the self-sensing contact probes, a report on the first application of self-sensing Conductive Atomic Force Microscopy for the analysis of dielectric degradation and a comparison with optical probes-based experiments were conducted, thus providing a reference for the community into the adoption of this emerging Atomic Force Microscopy technology.