Probing local electrical characteristics of surfaces by AFM

Electrical properties on small scales get increasingly important due to downscaling of device dimensions. The lateral homogeneity of the surface on  nanometer scale also becomes more important when devices scale down, since these variations will be no longer averaged out in the characteristics of the device when variations occur at a similar length scale as gate length. Proper understanding of the relationship between surface quality and electrical properties is essential knowledge to assist the transfer of new materials from concept to incorporation in technology. Furthermore, integration of new materials, methods and fabrication of smaller devices might require the development of methods to probe electrical properties on smaller length scales than possible with current metrology techniques.

Scanning probe techniques have proven to be able to give information on various physical properties on all kinds of substrates, often with high lateral resolution. Besides topographic information, various  properties can be extracted by extending the functionality of the tip or by using additional detection methods. 

In this talk, I'll mainly focus on utilization of AFM and its advanced techniques for probing electrical properties of materials providing various examples.