Wafer surface reconstruction from top-down scanning electron microscope images

    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

    Share

    COinS