NANOSTRUCTURE EVOLUTION AND ELECTROMIGRATION ON SILICON - EXPERIMENTAL APPLICATION OF LENGTH-SCALING PREDICTIONS

As the size-scale of practical devices shrinks into the sub-micron reg ime, the atomic characteristics of the component materials are increas ingly likely to manifest themselves in the fabrication, properties and stability of the devices. Predicting and controlling this behavior is a challenging problem in statistical mechanics, which can be approach ed via a length-scaling approach called the continuum step model. The successful application of this model to developing and analyzing exper iments on surface mass transport on Si will be presented. The relation ship between equilibrium step fluctuations and large scale mass transp ort on Si surfaces has demonstrated in quantitative measurements on th e formation and decay of metastable structures. The use of this approa ch to determine the physical mechanisms underlying the spontaneous for mation of metastable structures under a driving force induces by bulk electrical current, e.g. a surface electromigration effect, will be re viewed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.