Good morning. It is my pleasure this morning to welcome you on behalf of the National Bureau of Standards and our cosponsor, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to the Workshop on Surface Analysis for Silicon Devices.

This Workshop is the fourth in a series dedicated to the furtherance of the measurement technology needed by the semiconductor device industry in its attempt to provide to its customers products that are based on the most advanced technology yet have high reliability and the affordable costs which result from high yields.

These products are essential components in modern electronics, and they consequently play a vital role in the social and economic welfare of our Nation and in its defense. They are, therefore, a matter of considerable interest both to the Department of Commerce and to the Department of Defense, the parent organizations of the sponsors of these Workshops.

To those of you who are not in the semiconductor business, and in this Workshop in particular there are many such people, it may come as a surprise that there is any need for NBS and ARPA to carry on work in a field which is so technologically sophisticated and so innovative. The reason is that the sophistication and innovative abilities of the semiconductor industry have led to the development of new processes and new devices much faster than the measurement techniques for their control and characterization have been developed.

In the fifteen years that our NBS staff has worked with the semiconductor industry and its customers we have seen increasing need for improvements in practical methods of measurement for analysis, control, and specifications in this field. And we have learned that the Bureau can be especially helpful in this field because of its neutrality in evaluating measurement methods and associated technology, and because its charter encourages it to work in the area of generic measurement for industry-wide use and market-place application. This is an area where individual companies understand

ably find less incentive for extensive research than in areas leading to new and proprietary processes and designs.

As a result, the NBS Semiconductor Technology Program has been established, having as its goal the development and standardization of improved methods of measurement for use in specifying materials and devices and in control of device fabrication processes: methods that have been well documented and tested for technical adequacy, are of demonstrated precision of an industrially acceptable level, and are acceptable to both users and suppliers.

When such methods are used by the electronics industry, they are expected to provide a more consistent set of measured results and interpretations and, hence, lead to improved quality control and yield in the manufacturer's plant, and to improved reliability and economy in the customer's applications.

In recent years, ARPA has joined with us as a major sponsor of the program in order to provide a new approach to the solution of DoD problems in component reliability and availability, system costs, and system maintainability.

Our program now encompasses work on selected measurements ranging from those needed to characterize process materials; through those for photolithography, process control using test structures, bonding and die attachment, and hermeticity; on to thermal and electrical properties of finished devices.

Modern devices are dependent for their operation on the properties of extremely thin layers of silicon and oxides, and their interfaces. Performance demands, including those of reliability and radiation hardness, call for knowledge and manufacturing control of the chemical and physical makeup of these structures that pose requirements for sensitivity and spatial resolution far exceeding those provided by traditional analytical methods.

Thus, an exciting new area of interest in our Program is the subject of this Workshop: the determination of the present qualitative