EDFAS Online Community

The EDFAS Education Subcommittee strives for the development and delivery of educational products to the EDFAS membership. Keeping with its strategic focus on reaching a broader audience, including facilitating Q&A and educational exchanges on the ASM Connect platform, the Subcommittee presents short-format presentations on selected FA topics. These presentations are available on ASM Connect and highlighted in EDFA Magazine.

We are highlighting a tutorial by Katherine P. Rice, PhD, from CAMECA Instruments on Atom Probe Tomography: Introduction and Applications to Semiconductors.

This tutorial introduces the fundamentals of Atom Probe Tomography (APT) and explores applications in the field of semiconductor analysis. APT is a cutting-edge technique capable of delivering three-dimensional, atomic-scale compositional mapping with equal sensitivity to all elements in the periodic table. This makes it uniquely suited for analyzing complex materials and interfaces at the nanoscale, such as in failure analysis applications.

In this brief tutorial, Katherine Rice covers the basic principles of APT, how it works, and how it has become an essential tool for researchers and engineers working in advanced materials and semiconductor development. APT is being used by leading semiconductor companies, academic institutions, and national laboratories to investigate critical challenges such as dopant clustering and diffusion, grain boundary segregation, hydrogen embrittlement, and geological and isotopic analysis. If you are new to APT and/or looking to understand its relevance in semiconductor R&D, this tutorial provides both the basics and highlights real-world use cases.

Katherine Rice is the Applications and Market Development Manager at CAMECA Instruments, based in Madison, WI. She holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder and an MBA in Marketing from the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater. Katherine's research interests include dopant analysis and automation in atom probe tomography, as well as crystallographic characterization using transmission Electron Backscatter Diffraction (tEBSD/TKD). She loves training customers and managing her team in Madison.