As mentioned in other posts, the process of making these types of devices tend to produce rounded structures. This is a byproduct of using Ion beams, deposition, lithography, etc in manufacture.
BUT, the image is also made worse by how the image is captured. The picture you are looking at is a FIB (Focused Ion Beam) cut cross-section of a transistor which is then imaged by a SEM (scanning electron microscope). Probably in one of their fancy dual source beam devices. Depending on how you cut with the FIB, you can also push material downwards into lower layers and create a waterfall effect that will blur edges. It's can be very noticeable in rookie cuts but doesn't look like a major impact here.
Imaging with the SEM itself can also cause distortion and blurring as trapped charge accumulates on the surface and deflects the electron beam slightly. You can see this where the edges get increasingly bright because charges gather and become trapped at the boundary of the conductive and insulating layers. The image isn't sharp enough for me to tell if that is poly-silicon or aluminum contact traces.
>"As mentioned in other posts, the process of making these types of devices tend to produce rounded structures. This is a byproduct of using Ion beams, deposition, lithography, etc in manufacture."
Thanks for the detailed response. Might you have a link to one of those other posts or some other resources that talks about how these processes tend to produce rounded structures?
In the manufacturing process you have several methods that are used each with their own issues. Photo-lithography suffers from diffraction at the edges of features. Chemical processes undercut, overcut, and generally move around. They eat away faster at edges because of surface space and eat along different crystal lattice vectors at different rates. Plasma processes are effectively a hose of charged particles and have a sort of Gaussian distribution vs location of particle impact depending on your focus. And during the whole process, diffusion is trying to move everything around to boot. These effects exist at all scales, but when you get to IC scales, the effects can be dominant.
BUT, the image is also made worse by how the image is captured. The picture you are looking at is a FIB (Focused Ion Beam) cut cross-section of a transistor which is then imaged by a SEM (scanning electron microscope). Probably in one of their fancy dual source beam devices. Depending on how you cut with the FIB, you can also push material downwards into lower layers and create a waterfall effect that will blur edges. It's can be very noticeable in rookie cuts but doesn't look like a major impact here.
Imaging with the SEM itself can also cause distortion and blurring as trapped charge accumulates on the surface and deflects the electron beam slightly. You can see this where the edges get increasingly bright because charges gather and become trapped at the boundary of the conductive and insulating layers. The image isn't sharp enough for me to tell if that is poly-silicon or aluminum contact traces.