As smaller structures are being increasingly adopted in the semiconductor industry, the performance of memory and logic devices is being continuously improved with innovative 3D integration schemes as well as shrinking and stacking strategies. Owing to the increasing complexity of the design architectures, optical metrology techniques including spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE) and reflectometry have been widely used for efficient process development and yield ramp-up due to the capability of 3D structure measurements. However, there has been an increasing demand for a significant reduction in the physical spot diameter used in the SE technique; the spot diameter should be at least 10 times smaller than the cell dimension (~30 × 40 μm2) of typical dynamic random-access memory to be able to measure in-cell critical dimension (CD) variations. To this end, this study demonstrates a novel spectrum measurement system that utilizes the microsphere-assisted super-resolution effect, achieving extremely small spot spectral metrology by reducing the spot diameter to ~210 nm, while maintaining a sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, a geometric model is introduced for the microsphere-based spectral metrology system that can calculate the virtual image plane magnification and depth of focus, providing the optimal distance between the objective lens, microsphere, and sample to achieve the best possible imaging quality. The proof of concept was fully verified through both simulations and experiments for various samples. Thus, owing to its ultra-small spot metrology capability, this technique has great potential for solving the current metrology challenge of monitoring in-cell CD variations in advanced logic and memory devices.

A method for analysis of thin film thickness in spectroscopic reflectometry is proposed. In spectroscopic reflectometry, there has been a trade-off between accuracy and computation speed using the conventional analysis algorithms. The trade-off originated from the nonlinearity of spectral reflectance with respect to film thickness. In this paper, the spectral phase is extracted from spectral reflectance, and the thickness of the film can be calculated by linear equations. By using the proposed method, film thickness can be measured very fast with high accuracy. The simulation result shows that the film thickness can be acquired with high accuracy. In the simulation, analysis error is lower than 0.01% in the thickness range from 100 nm to 4 um. The experiments also show good accuracy. Maximum error is under 40 Å in the thickness range 3,000-20,000 Å. The experiments present that the proposed method is very fast. It takes only 2.6 s for volumetric thickness analysis of 640*480 pixels. The study suggests that the method can be a useful tool for the volumetric thickness measurement in display and semiconductor industries.

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White-light phase-shifting interferometry (WLPSI) is widely used for obtaining surface profiles of inspection targets in liquid-crystal displays (LCD) and semiconductor manufacturing processes. Phase errors caused by irregular and nonlinear scanner movement are inevitable in WLPSI. Moreover, these errors affect the measurement stability. It is difficult to eliminate the mechanical and electrical delay of scanner movement entirely. A novel method, to the best of our knowledge, is proposed that consists of a scanner position tracking system and a phase correction algorithm called compensated peak detection and modified bucket algorithm. The proposed method is experimentally verified and outperforms the conventional phase corrections in both the measurement accuracy and the repeatability.

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