Title

Wafer surface reconstruction from top-down scanning electron microscope images

Authors

Authors

E. Gelenbe; T. Kocak;R. Wang

Comments

Authors: contact us about adding a copy of your work at STARS@ucf.edu

Abbreviated Journal Title

Microelectron. Eng.

Keywords

semiconductor fabrication; critical dimension metrology; scanning; electron microscopy; artificial neural networks; image processing; SEM; METROLOGY; AFM; Engineering, Electrical & Electronic; Nanoscience & Nanotechnology; Optics; Physics, Applied

Abstract

In this paper, we propose and investigate several solutions to a difficult "inverse problem" which arises in semiconductor fabrication. The problem is to deduce a feature's vertical cross-section from two-dimensional top-down scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of the feature surface. Our first approach is to directly map from SEM intensity waveform to line profile. We show that the direct inverse function approach to profile reconstruction is very sensitive to intensity changes and that it can therefore be used to detect variations in wafer surface patterns. The other two approaches are based on physical modeling of the interaction between the electron beam and the feature surface. Our results are illustrated with a variety of real data sets originating from industry. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Journal Title

Microelectronic Engineering

Volume

75

Issue/Number

2

Publication Date

1-1-2004

Document Type

Article

Language

English

First Page

216

Last Page

233

WOS Identifier

WOS:000223442000013

ISSN

0167-9317

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