Electron-beam-induced soft-X-ray emission spectroscopy (SXES) that uses a grating spectrometer has been introduced to a conventional scanning electron microscope (SEM) for characterizing desired specimen areas of bulk materials. The spectrometer was designed as a grazing incidence flat-field optics by using aberration corrected (varied line spacing) gratings and a multichannel plate detector combined with a charge-coupled device camera, which has already been applied to a transmission electron microscope. The best resolution was confirmed as 0.13 eV at Mg L-emission (50 eV), which is comparable with that of recent dedicated electron energy-loss spectroscopy instruments. This SXES-SEM instrument presents density of states of simple metals of bulk Mg and Li. Apparent band-structure effects have been observed in Si L-emission of Si wafer, P L-emission of GaP wafer, and Al L-emissions of intermetallic compounds of AlCo, AlPd, Al2Pt, and Al2Au.

In this paper, the mechanisms of the suppression of Zr-silicide formation in poly-Si/ZrON/interfacial-layer/Si structure at 1000°C annealing are discussed in detail. It was demonstrated that gaseous SiO desorption, which played a dominant role in the silicide formation in the case of the ZrO2/SiO2/Si, was completely inhibited in the ZrON/interfacial-layer/Si structure. In addition, we have found that an ultrathin interfacial SiON layer between poly-Si and ZrON stabilized the interface. Consequently, we concluded that the effective nitrogen incorporation into top/bottom interfacial SiON layers with our process was responsible for the superior thermal stability of the stack.

Ti-Si-O films were sputter deposited from TiO2+SiO2 composite targets with various SiO2 content. The phase separation occurred for every SiO2 content used in this experiment (from 14% to 75%) and it has been revealed that nanocrystalline (TiO2)1-x(SiO2)x films in which anatase TiO2 forms tiny grains were obtained when x in the film is larger than 0.26. The tiny grain was effective for suppressing the thermal grooving phenomenon of the thin films by the post deposition annealing which leads to the leakage current increase. The dielectric constant of the nanocrystalline film was varied with the SiO2 content from the value of the bulk anatase to SiO2.