Competence Areas
Fraunhofer Center Nanoelectronic Technologies
Atom Probe Tomography (APT)
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- An example of a ~ 7 nm TiB2 precipitate formed at the TiN/TiSi2 interface
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- Spatial distribution of the constituent elements of glassy Cu 47Zr41Gd5Al7 as analysed by atom probe tomography. Iso-concentration surface (10 at% Gd) is drawn in green to elaborate the Gd enriched phase.
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Fraunhofer CNT has established a unique analytical facility i.e., Atom Probe Tomography, which is one of the few of its kind through out the world. This technique reveals spatial distribution and chemical identity, with near atomic resolution, of majority of the atoms in the real space. A specimen in the form of a sharp needle, with end radius ~ 100 nm, is cooled to cryogenic temperatures in a UHV chamber. Individual atoms of the specimen are field evaporated either by high voltage pulses, or by the assistance of laser pulses. A position sensitive detector provides the spatial information of the ion hits, while, the elemental information is attained by measuring the time of flight. A sophisticated visualization and analysis software can determine and reconstruct in 3-D atomic positions along with their elemental nature for a given volume of the analyzed material. This microscope is able to operate either in laser pulsing mode or voltage pulsing mode depending on the electro-mechanical properties of the analyzed material.
Applications
• APT provides elemental information along with the 3-D positioning in a volume containing potentially hundreds of millions of atoms
• Determination of the elemental concentration in any sub-volume with out the need of any standard
• Dedicated quantitative analysis of precipitates and clusters
• Characterization of surfaces and interfaces with respect to anomalies (e.g. grain borders) and roughness
• Calculation of interatomic elemental distributions for studying ordering, the interaction of dopants, the formation of clusters and early stages of precipitate formation.
• Determination of the elemental concentration in any sub-volume with out the need of any standard
• Dedicated quantitative analysis of precipitates and clusters
• Characterization of surfaces and interfaces with respect to anomalies (e.g. grain borders) and roughness
• Calculation of interatomic elemental distributions for studying ordering, the interaction of dopants, the formation of clusters and early stages of precipitate formation.
Technical Specifications
FhG CNT has acquired a state of art advanced atom probe instrument named LEAP 3000X Si™ having following specifications
| Lateral Resolution | 0.3 - 0.5 nm |
| Depth Resolution | ~ 0.2 nm |
| Field of View | 175 nm |
| Pulse repetition rate | 1-500 kHz |
| Maximum data collection rate | 5 million ions/minute |
| mass resolution FWHM of m/Δm | ≤ 1200 |
| Operating temperature range | 20-100 K |
| Operating Pressure at 50 K or less UHV | < 1 x 10-10 Torr |
Research Areas
Semiconducting Materials
• High-k dielectrics
• Contact Materials
• Metallization layers
• Metal-Insulator-Metal stacks
• Dopant depth profiling
Nuclear Fusion Material
• Oxide dispersion strengthened steels
Hard coatings
• Nano composite Ti-B-N Coating
Metallic glasses
• Ni-Nb-Y metallic ribbons
• Cu-Zr-Gd metallic ribbons
• Cu-Zr-Al-Gd metallic ribbons
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