2004 年 70 巻 4 号 p. 547-551
Ultraprecision surface preparation techniques to make atomically flat semiconductor surfaces are strongly demanded toward the next-generation semiconductor technology age including nanotechnology age, in which extremely integrated and functionally enhanced devices will be realized. Particularly, Si(001) surface is the most important and widely utilized surface because of the controllability of the interfacial electronic state density at the surface oxidized film. This will be the case into future nanotechnology age. However, Si(001) surface is the most difficult surface to be flattened, and no industrially promising method exists. The only possible technique is a heating method in ultra-high vacuum and is unfortunately not useful from viewpoints of industrial applications. In this work, a new EEM (elastic emission machining) system is developed and tried to apply to the preparation of ultrasmooth Si(001) surface. Processed surfaces are observed and characterized by AFM (atomic force microscope), STM (scanning tunneling microscope) and LEED (low energy electron diffraction). Obtained STM images show that EEM surfaces have an atomic-level flatness, and about 95% of a extended area having a dimension of 100nm×100nm is constructed by only three atomic layers having a structure of 1×1 surface lattice.
