A comparative study of SIMS depth profiling of boron in silicon

Details are given of a round robin depth profile comparison between 9 SIMS instruments (6 instrument types) applied to the analysis of an ion implanted Si(B) sample. It is shown that the shape of the boron profile is not sensitive to the sputter conditions employed and that the profile width data shows agreement to within 10% over the concentration range ∼1021 to 1015 cm−3 (104 to 0.02 ppma). This level of agreement is encouraging and gives confidence in the reliability of the SIMS method. Instrumental factors which control the profile dynamic range are shown to be dependent on the system configuration. With the quadrupole-based raster scanning instruments the quality of the primary beam is of importance, while with the imaging ion microscope systems, memory effects are significant. A dynamic range of ∼5 × 105 is obtained from both types of instrument. The analysis of identical samples prepared by ion implantation should enable other SIMS workers to check instrumental performance.