Comparison of Si surface roughness measured by atomic force microscopy and ellipsometry

Abstract

Measurements of Si surface roughness by atomic force microscopy and ellipsometry have been performed over a wide range of conditions. Advanced methods of data analysis have been applied to both techniques leading to a quantitative comparison of root-mean-square (rms) roughness to the ellipsometric paramter Δ. Differences in Δ are observed for surfaces with the same rms roughness, but different roughness spectral densities, as expected from theory.

Comparative characterisation by atomic force microscopy and ellipsometry of soft and solid thin films

“…The volume fraction of wet-etched Si was found to be between 40% and 50%. 28 It is quite common to fix a volume factor of 0.5 for a rough layer. 11,40 Recently Franta et al 41 presented two numerical EMA analyses of a simulated rough surface.…”

“…Fang et al 28 studied the relationship between the AFM roughness and the ellipsometric parameters for a chemically treated rough Si surface and showed that AFM roughness without the roughness spectral density information does not determine the ellipsometry parameters unambiguously. However, to our knowledge, all papers published to date deal with either soft organic films 3,20,27,29 or solid semiconductor/dielectric surfaces, 28,30,31 but not both together.…”

Ellipsometry and Its Applications in Stoichiometry

“…The results show that the surface roughness can be detected effectively by measuring the ellipsometry parameters. A more common way to characterize the surface roughness is to employ both ellipsometry and AFM as reported by several authors [74]. Figure 8 shows the relationship between ellipsometry parameters and rms roughness obtained by calculation from AFM images.…”

Continuous-wave ultrasound reflectometry for surface roughness imaging applications

“…In addition, because of the contact, there is the risk of damage to the surface of the item being tested. These observations have provided the impetus for many investigators to seek a variety of imaging technologies [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] for the inspection and measurement of surface roughness. The ultimate goal in this line of research is to quantitatively evaluate the roughness of a surface.…”