Fast Analysis of Film Thickness in Spectroscopic Reflectometry using Direct Phase Extraction

Abstract

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 <TEX>$40{\AA}$</TEX> in the thickness range <TEX>$3,000-20,000{\AA}$</TEX>. 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.