Improving feature resolution and pore back effect in focused ion beam tomography of porous GaN thin films

Abstract

Porous gallium nitride (GaN) is a mesoporous crystalline material, typically in the form of a thin film on an unlike substrate, prepared by electrochemically etching conductive GaN. The use of porous GaN in electronics and optoelectronics is rapidly expanding, but is held back significantly by a lack of structural control and understanding of the principles of pore formation from underlying electrochemical mechanisms, where high-quality characterisation of pore morphology is essential to understanding these principles. Focused ion beam (FIB) tomography is an invaluable tool for such characterisation, but is hindered greatly by the pore back effect, where unwanted contrast appears in an image due to electrons scattering out from the back wall of a pore. No major attempts to formally quantify or assess the extent of the effect for different tomography experiments has been demonstrated. In this work, we demonstrate an advanced methodology for performing FIB tomography on porous GaN thin films, where the experiment is rotated to image pores perpendicular to the surface of the sample, and introduce new voxel intensity-based formalisms for assessing the impact of the pore back effect based on voxel intensities for individual features and the whole dataset. The new approach, which requires more complex preliminary setup, is found to significantly mitigate the pore back effect in porous GaN thin films with a range of pore morphologies without increasing the total experimental duration. The pore back effect can thus be quantified and mitigated in FIB tomography of porous GaN and similar mesoporous thin films.