• Journal of the Optical Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.236-243
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• 2014

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.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.31 no.11
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• pp.999-1006
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• 2014

In this investigation, we explain the sub-sampling technique of white light scanning interferometry (WLSI) to improve the measurement speed. In addition to the previous work using Fourier domain analysis, several methods to extract the height from the correlogram of WLSI are described with the sub-sampling technique. Especially, Fourier-inverse Fourier transformation method adopting sub-sampling technique is proposed and the phase compensation technique is verified with simulation and experiments. The main advantage of sub-sampling is to speed up the measurements of WLSI but the precision such as repeatability is slightly poor. In case of measuring the sample which has high height step or difference, the proposed technique can be widely used to reduce the measurement time.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2007.06a
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• pp.86-87
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• 2007

The dispersive method of white-light interferometry is proper for in-line 3-D inspection of dielectric thin-film thickness to be used in the semiconductor and flat-panel display industry. This research is the measurement application of CMP patterned wafer. The results describe 3-D and 2-D profile of the step height during polishing time.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2008.11a
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• pp.105-106
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• 2008

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2006.10a
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• pp.5-6
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• 2006

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2006.10a
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• pp.1-2
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• 2006

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2006.10a
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• pp.7-8
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• 2006

• Journal of the Optical Society of Korea
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.415-422
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• 2013

White-light phase-shifting interferometry (WLPSI) is widely recognized as a standard method to measure shapes with high resolution over a long distance. In practical applications, WLPSI, however, is associated with some degree of ambiguity of its phase, which occurs due to a phase delay, which is the offset between the phase of the fringes and the fringe envelope peak position. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed for the determination of a fringe order suitable for samples in which the phase delay mainly occurs due to noise, diffraction and a steep angle. The concepts of the decouple factor and the connectivity are introduced and a method for calculating the decouple factor and the connectivity is developed. With the phase-unwrapping procedure which considers these values, it is demonstrated that our algorithm determines the correct fringe order. To verify the performance of the algorithm, a simulation was performed with the virtual step height under noise. Some specimens such as step height standard and a column spacer with a steep angle are also measured with a Mirau interference microscope, after which the algorithm is shown to be effective and robust.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.22 no.5 s.170
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• pp.21-27
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• 2005

• Journal of the Optical Society of Korea
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.317-322
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• 2013

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.