In this investigation, a low cost Si wafer metrology system based on low coherence interferometry using NIR light is proposed and verified. The whole system consists of two low coherence interferometric principles: low coherence scanning interferometry (LCSI) for measuring surface profiles and spectrally-resolved interferometry (SRI) to obtain the nominal optical thickness of the double-sided polished Si wafer. The combination of two techniques can reduce the measurement time and give adequate dimensional information of the Si wafer. The wavelength of the optical source is around 1 μm, for which transmission is non-zero for undoped silicon and can be also detected by a typical CCD camera. Because of the typical CCD camera, the whole system can be constructed inexpensively.

We propose a novel and simple method of single-shot freeform surface profiler based on spatially phase-shifted lateral shearing interferometry. By the adoption of birefringent materials, the laterally shearing waves are simply generated without any bulky and complicated optical components. Moreover, the phase maps that lead to the 3D profile of the freeform surface can be instantly obtained by the spatial phase-shifting technique using a pixelated polarizing camera. The proposed method was theoretically described and verified by measuring several samples in comparison to the measurement results with a well-established stylus probe.

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We present a single-shot spectrally-resolved interferometry for simultaneously measuring the film thickness and surface profile of each layer of a patterned multilayer film structure. For this purpose, we implemented an achromatic phase shifting method based on the geometric phase using the polarization characteristics of the light and obtained four phase-shifted interferograms in the spectrally-resolved fringe pattern at the same time by combining a pixelated polarizing camera with an imaging spectrometer. As a result, we could simultaneously measure the reflectance and phase of the sample over a wide wavelength range with a single measurement. To evaluate the validity of the proposed method, we measured a patterned five-layer film specimen and compared our measurement results with those from commercial instruments, an ellipsometer and a stylus profiler, respectively. We confirmed the results matched each other well.

Subaperture stitching wavelength scanning interferometry with a high-accuracy multi-axis position stage is proposed for measuring complex surface shapes such as aspherical and freeform optics. Typical optical approaches suffer due to poor fringe visibility when it comes to complex-shaped optics. Our proposed technique allows a proper solution to this challenging issue by keeping the optical probe perpendicular to the surface slope, which provides good fringe visibility during the wavelength scan regardless of how steep the surface is. Also, the full-aperture surface map of a test sample can be obtained by stitching multiple subaperture measurement results with high precision. We tested and verified our method by measuring several representative samples and comparing the measurement results with a well-established stylus method.