Investigation of second-harmonic generation for SOI wafer metrology

Second-harmonic generation has proven to be a contactless and noninvasive probe of buried semiconductor/oxide interfaces. It has previously been demonstrated that SHG can be used to monitor interface quality and charge carrier dynamics in UNIBOND® SOI wafers. Here we report results obtained from commercial SOI wafers, made by the SIMOX method, and by a bonding plus layer transfer process. We suggest that characterization using optical second-harmonic generation may be suitable for in situ monitoring of SOI wafer quality.