Title
Wafer surface reconstruction from top-down scanning electron microscope images
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
ISSN
0167-9317
Recommended Citation
"Wafer surface reconstruction from top-down scanning electron microscope images" (2004). Faculty Bibliography 2000s. 4370.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/facultybib2000/4370
Comments
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