The continuing drive in the semiconductor industry towards smaller and more complex electronic devices has placed increasing severe demands on the materials systems that are used in semiconductor circuits. The refractory metal silicides that are commonly used for electrodes and interconnects are particularly susceptible to the sometimes conflicting requirements of good electrical properties, ease of processing, and long term reliability. We have found that the characterization of metal silicides with a fully automated diffractometer based on the Seemann- Bohlin (S∼B) focusing geometry has proved to be an important aid in the development of several semiconductor metallization systems.

Although a conventional Bragg-Brentano (B-B) diffractometer can provide adequate information for some thin film systems, the use of an S-B diffractometer in which the incident x-ray beam makes a very small angle of incidence with the sample surface results in a substantial improvement in the usable signal from very thin samples.