Reducing the Aspect Ratio of Contact Holes by In-Situ Low-Angle Cross Sectioning

Auger analysis of high-aspect ratio contact holes of integrated microelectronic devices is a challenging analytical task. Due to geometrical shadowing the primary electron beam and the energy analyser have not the required direct line of sight to the analysis area simultaneously. To solve this problem sample preparation is needed to flatten the 3-dimensional geometry. Here the new approach of in-situ low-angle cross sectioning is applied. By this method material gets removed inside the Auger instrument while the sample is sputtered by Ar+ ions at nearly grazing incidence utilizing the edge of a mask, which partly covers the sample. A very shallow bevel with respect to the sample surface is produced. Thus along the bevel contact holes with suitable aspect ratios are available for the Auger analysis.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures in J. Electron Spectrosc. Relat. Phenom., 201

Monetary Policy Implementation and Overnight Rate Persistence

Overnight money market rates are the predominant operational target of monetary policy. As a consequence, central banks have re- designed the implementation of monetary policy to keep the deviations of the overnight rate from the key policy rate small and short-lived. This paper uses fractional integration techniques to explore how the operational framework of four major central banks affects the persis- tence of overnight rates. Our results suggest that a well-communicated and transparent interest rate target of the central bank is a particu- larly important condition for a low degree of overnight rate persistence.Controllability and Persistence of Interest Rates; Oper- ational Framework of Central Banks; Long Memory and Fractional Integration

Loan supply in Germany during the financial crisis

Distinguishing pure supply effects from other determinants of price and quantity in the market for loans is a notoriously difficult problem. Using German data, we employ Bayesian vector autoregressive models with sign restrictions on the impulse response functions in order to enquire the role of loan supply and monetary policy shocks for the dynamics of loans to non-financial corporations. For the three quarters following the Lehman collapse, we find very strong negative loan supply shocks, while monetary policy was essentially neutral. Nevertheless, the historical decomposition shows a cumulated negative impact of loan supply shocks and monetary policy shocks on loans to non-financial corporations, due to the lagged effects of past loan supply and monetary policy shocks. However, these negative effects on loans to non-financial corporations are overcompensated by positive other shocks, which implies that loans developed more favorably than implied by the model, over the past few quarters. --Loan supply,Bayesian VAR,sign restrictions