Markets

Leading IC manufacturers are introducing forms of strained silicon for next generations of semiconductor products. Strained silicon has been adopted as an efficient pathway to greatly enhanced performance — a 1% silicon lattice strain typically results in a doubling or tripling of the electronic mobility. This approach does not require new device structures and is closely compatible with standard CMOS processing. The industry has identified new metrology capabilities as critical to enable process control for strained silicon structures. However, available methods do not meet the requirements for use in production. With technology created specifically for rapid characterization of ultra-thin semiconductor films, Xitronix Corporation is now poised to take advantage of this measurement capability gap in the semiconductor industry. This market will expand to include characterization of new band-engineered thin films.