The thermal resistance along the thickness of In3SbTe2 crystalline nanowires was measured using the scanning thermal microscopy in 3ω mode. The nanowires were grown by metal organic vapor deposition, exploiting the VLS mechanism induced by Au metal‐catalyst nanoparticles and harvested on a SiO2/Si substrate. Two nanowires with different thickness (13 and 23 nm) were investigated. The thermal resistance of the nanowires was determined using two different approaches; the first one exploits the experimental data, whereas the second one is more sophisticated, since it involves a minimization procedure. Both methods led to comparable values of the thermal resistance along the transverse direction (thickness) of the nanowire. The obtained results were explained starting from the mean free path of phonons calculated in the In3SbTe2 bulk.

Electron beams are commonly used to inspect wafers for defective contact plugs during the manufacturing of semiconductor integrated circuits. The plugs form a part of the overall electrical connection to the transistors. These plugs can fail to make adequate electrical contact to the underlying circuitry. They may also be connected to faulty circuits. As a result, the voltage from such defective plugs evolves differently upon irradiation by an electron beam. The paths of the secondary electrons emitted from a defective plug respond to this voltage, thereby modifying the fraction of the emitted current that reaches a detector as compared to the fraction obtained from a healthy contact plug. This paper analyzes the fundamental kinetics that ultimately produces this contrast in a scanning electron microscope designed for wafer inspection. In particular, the paper investigates the kinetics of secondary electron emission from an isolated, biased plug embedded in a charge-neutral dielectric. It presents analytic models for the dependence of the electron collection efficiency with the plug voltage and an applied vertical field at the wafer. The analytic results are compared with those from numerical simulations to test the assumptions that enter the models. The mathematical derivations may ultimately be used to estimate the signal that can be extracted from plugs at dissimilar potentials.

Electron beam inspection has been commonly used in the semiconductor fabrication process to inspect wafers for defective metal or polysilicon plugs, plugs that fail to make an electrical contact to the underlying circuitry. Recently, there has been interest in using electron beams to inspect plugs that are not necessarily electrically floating but have a high resistive path to ground. This paper addresses the reliability of such an inspection by examining the minimum resistance value that is detectable for a given column condition and gives guidelines for optimal inspection conditions for finding such a defective plug. The investigation is done using a transient simulation in a general purpose 3-D electron beam simulator that uses Monte Carlo simulations to trace the path of an ensemble of charged particles in an electrostatic field and couples with a general purpose Poisson solver that is also used to update the electrostatic fields from evolving charge profiles.

In this work we present the measurements of thermal conductivity of nanowire Sb2Te3 phase change. These measurements are made using a thermal scanning probe microscopy (SThM) operating in regime modulated type 3ω. The spatial resolution of the probe is of the order of 100 nm. The measurement of amplitude and phase are used to identify unknown radius of contact between the nanowire and the sensor parameters, the contact resistance at the interface probe and nanowire and the thermal conductivity of the nanowire. An identification method is used which minimizes the difference between the measured values and those from a simulated model of heat transfer in the materials. This model uses a matched model heat transfer in the probe