Transmission electron microscopy studies on the lateral growth of nickel silicides

Abstract

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) has been utilized to study the nickel-silicide growth in self-supported lateral-diffusion, thin-film couples by overlapping deposited layers of Ni and Si between two silicon oxide deposited films. Energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy, microdiffraction, and selected area diffraction were used to identify the Ni-silicide phases and their crystal structures. Long-grain growth of Ni2Si, as a result of phase-boundary migration induced by diffusion, was observed during in situ annealing between 500 and 750 °C in TEM. No preferred orientation or particular crystallographic relationship was found among the long grains.

Contact Formation on Silicon Carbide by Use of Nickel and Tantalum in a Materials Science Point of View

“…Other techniques such as ion beam mixing (Hsu & Liang, 2005) and mechanical alloying (Lee et al, 2001) can also be used. In the case of thin film reactions, (Ottaviani, 1979;Zheng et al, 1983;Chen et al, 1985;Lee et al, 2000;Yoon et al, 2003), the formation of the compounds depends on the relative amounts of the Ni and Si available for the reactions, the annealing temperature, the atmosphere, and impurities contained in the layers. Important characteristics include sequential appearance of phases, i.e.…”

The New Youth of the In Situ Transmission Electron Microscopy

“…In this framework, the evolution observed in the design of heating holders, going from homemade custom ones [9,10] to commercial furnace-type ones [11,12] to the most recent developments involving strongly localized micron-wide heating areas, affected the feasibility of heating experiments.…”

Developments of cation-exchange by in situ electron microscopy

“…This capability must be paired with two fundamental technical requisites: minimizing the thermally induced spatial drift of the sample and abating the power required to heat it. Until the last decade, these heating holders were either custom-made [11,12] or commercial, with the heat source being constituted by a small furnace surrounding a clamped TEM sample, usually either deposited on an electrontransparent film, eventually supported by a metallic, thermally conductive grid, or directly attached onto the grid [13,14]. In all these cases the temperature was measured either by a thermocouple in contact with the heating element of the holder or by a priori calibration curve, based on the correspondence between heating current and temperature.…”