The main objective of the thesis is to provide reliable support to the processing of front-end materials for advanced FD-SOI technologies. To achieve this, methodologies for elemental quantification focused on the use of hard X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (HAXPES) will be developed and validated through a collaborative framework at multiple levels, both internal and industrial.
These collaborations will enable to pool upstream work aimed at a better understanding of quantification in HAXPES at all levels (intensity measurement, types of sensitivity factors used, measurement reproducibility).
In a second step, the protocols will be applied to the targeted technological materials and then optimized. The targeted materials are primarily silicon and germanium compounds contributing to the optimization of the channels of advanced FD-SOI transistors, such as Si:P, SiGe, and their derivatives (GeSn, SiGe:B). A combined analytical approach involving other nanoscale characterization techniques will be strengthened by identifying the most appropriate techniques to produce reference data (ToF-SIMS, RBS, etc.).
In a third step, multi-scale aspects will be developed. In particular, they will aim to investigate to what extent the composition measured by HAXPES on a material developed upstream of transistor integration steps (for process deposition optimization) compares to that determined by other techniques (atom probe tomography, TEM-EDX, TEM-EELS) at the end of nanometric device integration.