We have proposed and demonstrated a low numerical aperture technique to measure the depth of through silicon vias (TSVs) using white-light scanning interferometry. The high aspect ratio hole like TSV's was considered to be impossible to measure using conventional optical methods due to low visibility at the bottom of the hole. We assumed that the limitation of the measurement was caused by reflection attenuation in TSVs. A novel interference theory which takes the structural reflection attenuation into consideration was proposed and simulated. As a result, we figured out that the low visibility in the interference signal was caused by the unbalanced light intensity between the object and the reference mirror. Unbalanced light can be balanced using an aperture at the illumination optics. As a result of simulation and experiment, we figured out that the interference signal can be enhanced using the proposed technique. With the proposed optics, the depth of TSVs having an aspect ratio of 11.2 was measured in 5 seconds. The proposed method is expected to be an alternative method for 3-D inspection of TSVs.

Surface profiling and film thickness measurement play an important role for inspection. White light interferometry is widely used for engineering surfaces profiling, but its applications are limited primarily to opaque surfaces with relatively simple optical reflection behavior. The conventional bucket algorithm had given inaccurate surface profiles because of the phase error that occurs when a thin-film exists on the top of the surface. Recently, reflectometry and white light scanning interferometry were combined to measure the film thickness and surface profile. These techniques, however, have found that many local minima exist, so it is necessary to make proper initial guesses to reach the global minimum quickly. In this paper we propose combing reflectometry and white light scanning interferometry to measure the thin-film thickness and surface profile. The key idea is to divide the measurement into two states; reflectometry mode and interferometry mode to obtain the thickness and profile separately. Interferogram modeling, which considers transparent thin-film, was proposed to determine parameters such as height and thickness. With the proposed method, the ambiguity in determining the thickness and the surface has been eliminated. Standard thickness specimens were measured using the proposed method. Multi-layered film measurement results were compared with AFM measurement results. The comparison showed that surface profile and thin-film thickness can be measured successfully through the proposed method.

White-light scanning interferometry is widely used for precision metrology of engineering surfaces. It needs a mechanical scanning for capturing an interferogram that determines where the surface of a measured sample is located. The residual vibration during the scanning procedure distorts the interferogram and it reduces the accuracy and the precision of the system. The residual vibration becomes bigger as the proportional gain gets higher for the fast response. So it is hard to achieve the fast and precise measurement simultaneously. In this study, input shaping which convolves a reference signal with the input shaper is investigated to reduce the residual vibration of the scanning system. The step response data is analyzed using Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) to design the input shaper. Using proposed method, the residual vibration of the white light scanning interferometry is reduced and it achieved both faster measurement speed and more accurate measurement.

An optical microscopy system as a non-destructive method for measuring critical dimension (CD) is widely used for its stability and fastness. In case of transparent thin film measurement, it is hard to recognize the pattern under white light illumination due to its transparency and reflectance characteristics. In this paper, the optical measurement system using multispectral imaging for CD measurement of transparent thin film is introduced. The measurement system utilizes an Acousto-Optic Tunable Filter (AOTF) to illuminate the specimen with various monochromatic lights. The relationship between spectral reflectance and CD measurement are deduced from series of measurement experiments with two kinds of Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) patterned samples. When the difference of spectral reflectance between substrate and thin film layers is large enough to yield a large image intensity difference, the thin film layer can be distinguished from substrate, and it is possible to measure the CD of transparent thin films. This paper analyzes CD measurement of transparent thin film with reflectance theory and shows that the CD measurement of transparent thin film can be performed successfully with the proposed system within a certain wavelength range filtered by AOTF.

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