학술논문

A Tabletop X-Ray Tomography Instrument for Nanometer-Scale Imaging: Demonstration of the 1,000-Element Transition-Edge Sensor Subarray
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercond. Applied Superconductivity, IEEE Transactions on. 33(5):1-5 Aug, 2023
Subject
Fields, Waves and Electromagnetics
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Integrated circuits
SQUIDs
Detectors
Imaging
6G mobile communication
Tomography
X-ray imaging
Transition-edge sensors
superconducting microcalorimeters
multiplexing
Language
ISSN
1051-8223
1558-2515
2378-7074
Abstract
We report on the 1,000-element transition-edge sensor (TES) x-ray spectrometer implementation of the TOMographic Circuit Analysis Tool (TOMCAT). TOMCAT combines a high spatial resolution scanning electron microscope (SEM) with a highly efficient and pixelated TES spectrometer to reconstruct three-dimensional maps of nanoscale integrated circuits (ICs). A 240-pixel prototype spectrometer was recently used to reconstruct ICs at the 130 nm technology node, but to increase imaging speed to more practical levels, the detector efficiency needs to be improved. For this reason, we are building a spectrometer that will eventually contain 3,000 TES microcalorimeters read out with microwave superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) multiplexing, and we currently have commissioned a 1,000 TES subarray. This still represents a significant improvement from the 240-pixel system and allows us to begin characterizing the full spectrometer performance. Of the 992 maximimum available readout channels, we have yielded 818 devices, representing the largest number of TES x-ray microcalorimeters simultaneously read out to date. These microcalorimeters have been optimized for pulse speed rather than purely energy resolution, and we measure a FWHM energy resolution of 14 eV at the 8.0 keV Cu K$\bm {\alpha}$ line.