A multimode single-chip scanning probe microscope for simultaneous topographical and thermal metrology at the nanometer scale

This paper reports the first single-chip scanning probe microscope (sc-SPM) that is capable of simultaneously performing atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning thermal microscopy (SThM) without requiring any off-chip scanning or sensing components. A thermal-piezoresistive resonant sensor is used to hold the tip-sample interaction force constant, while a bolometer-style probe measures local heat transfer effects. The reported instrument obtains local thermal measurements of powered electrothermal MEMS devices and also achieves the first patterning results with a single-chip scanning probe instrument. Importantly, subsurface features on a 22nm CMOS chip are revealed by thermal phase imaging with the present device.