Foreword

The global semiconductor industry uses highly complex processes to manufacture state of the art integrated circuits and microelectromechanical systems for a wide variety of applications. Nowadays, these applications go well beyond the traditional information processing and storage. The measurement of the material and device level properties of a semiconductor is essential knowledge to any practicing engineer and researcher. Due to the dynamic nature of this industry, a large body of measurement techniques had been developed over the past five decades. There are excellent texts such as D.K. Schroder’s textbook on the characterization field. However, these texts do not cover the increasingly important topic of strain measurement in semiconductors to any sufficient extent. This eBook is the first attempt to fill this gap in the literature. It is a bridge between the review articles in journals and full length research monographs on one specific topic. The author has made a comprehensive survey of the available strain measurement techniques which are grouped according to the type of electromagnetic radiation or particle beam used to probe the sample. The chapters of this volume follow a uniform structure. For each technique, the essential theory is outlined first with reference to the published literature. This is followed by the experimental method and the capabilities and limitation of the method. Examples of how the method is applied in practice are then given. This format and the conciseness of each chapter will make it convenient to refer and it is not necessary to read the chapters in sequence. This eBook should be a useful addition to the semiconductor literature and its electronic format will ensure it can remain up to date in future.