Electron microscopy shows ‘mouse bite’ defects in semiconductors

Metrology is probably the most important part of semiconductor manufacturing aside from actually putting features on the wafer.

Statistical process control is at the heart of profitability, and measurement of what we've actually built is how it gets its data. If the accuracy and frequency of measurement goes up, the control loop tightens accordingly.

Parameterizing features and defects is a really interesting multidisciplinary process. Figuring out how to correlate defects at EDS time with something that occurred 80 process steps ago is where all the money lives in the business. Once you draw the correlation, you can place it under SPC and people will automatically get paged in the middle of the night the moment something starts to drift into an unhappy range.

Original article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69733-1

> At Bell Labs, Muller and fellow scientist Glen Wilk ’90, who is now vice president of technology at ASM, tried replacing silicon dioxide - the prevailing gate material, which leaked too much current at small scales – with hafnium oxide.

They are naming professors like "Now That's What I Call Music" albums now?

(I genuinely can't find why there's a '90 there, suspect it's a copy/paste error?)

Put out some really tiny mousetraps then?

He needs mouse bites to live

Solid work. The technical details are appreciated.

any hope that this could be applied to improving memory fab yields and ease some of the capacity constraints on consumer devices? asking for a friend