Stress engineering related to the LSI process is required. With shallow trench isolation (STI) structures, a high stress field causes a variation in electrical characteristics. Although stress fields in a Si substrate can be detected by Raman spectroscopy, no effective technique has been reported for the measurement of nanoscale stress fields in a dielectric material used for STI filling. Recently, we have reported that ''cathodoluminescence (CL) spectroscopy'' enables us to detect nanometer-scale stress fields in LSI structures. In this study, we performed the first estimation of the stress fields with a STI structure by CL and Raman spectroscopy, as well as finite element method (FEM) calculation. We were able to repeatedly acquire clear stress distributions by CL and Raman spectroscopy. Moreover, CL, Raman, and FEM results showed excellent agreement with one another, revealing that a large variation in stresses along the AA/STI boundary was induced by the intrinsic tensile stress of the SiO 2 film.

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We describe the stress analysis of silicon oxide (SiO2) thin film using cathodoluminescence (CL) spectroscopy and discuss its availability in this paper. To directly measure the CL spectra of the film under uniaxial tensile stresses, specially developed uniaxial tensile test equipment is used in a scanning electron microscope (SEM) equipped with a CL system. As tensile stress increases, the peak position and intensity proportionally increase. This indicates that CL spectroscopy is available as a stress measurement tool for SiO2 film. However, the electron beam (EB) irradiation time influences the intensity and full width at half maximum (FWHM), which implies that some damage originating from EB irradiation accumulates in the film. The analyses using Raman spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) demonstrate that EB irradiation for stress measurement with CL induces the formation of silicon (Si) nanocrystals into SiO2 film, indicating that CL stress analysis of the film is not nondestructive, but destructive inspection.