Characteristic of Plasma FIB and Suppression Method for Ion-Beam Induced Artifacts under High-Current Milling

Abstract

Xe plasma FIB offers an extremely high etching rate at least 50 times higher than common liquid metal ion source based Ga FIB. In recent years, plasma FIB-SEM systems become more important and popular in many application fields, such as failure analysis in the semiconductor industry, large-volume 3D tomography with EDS and EBSD analysis for metals, ceramics, rock samples, and various materials in the material science field. Some materials and samples exhibit poor cross section quality with some FIB induced artifacts (terrace/rippling, curtaining). Such artifacts are more pronounced on plasma FIB instruments due to their high probe current. Suppression methods for such artifacts become more important to utilize plasma FIB-SEM systems. However, there are few reports in domestic journals describing characteristics of these artifacts from the viewpoint of high-current milling. Therefore, this article introduces FIB induced artifacts from the viewpoint of the forming process and some techniques for high current artifact-free milling by plasma FIB.