Origin analysis of thermal neutron soft error rate at nanometer scale

Recently, thermal neutrons have been identified as a cause of soft errors in advanced electronic devices. To analyze the origin of such errors, dynamic secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), time-of-flight (TOF)-SIMS, and three-dimensional atom probe (3DAP) methods have been used systematically. TOF-SIMS results showed that the existence region of B-10, the source of soft errors, has a high correlation to the existence region of W. Furthermore, 3DAP results for the sample extracted from the area near the W-plug revealed high B-10 concentration at the W-plug. (C) 2015 American Vacuum Society.