Taming the Distribution of Light in Gate-All-Around Semiconductor Devices

Abstract

Optical metrology is ubiquitous, but image-based methods cannot resolve features of dimensions much smaller than the wavelength. However, it has recently been demonstrated that light can be nanofocused into subwavelength semiconducting lines by setting the incident polarization along the direction of these lines. This Letter extends the previous studies to systems with two perpendicular gratings, as found e.g. after replacement gate processing of gate-all-around (GAA) field-effect transistors (FETs). We show that besides the nanofocusing effect, the incident polarization also offers control over which array of lines the light couples into. The interaction of the incident light occurs with the semiconducting lines to which the polarization is parallel with remarkably low interference from the existence of another perpendicular grating. We demonstrate the use of this effect with Raman spectroscopy to simultaneously extract the SiGe volume and the strain in the Si forksheet channels and in the SiGe layers of GAA FETs.