Influence of standing wave phase error on super-resolution optical inspection for periodic microstructures

Abstract

The miniaturization of microfabricated structures such as patterned semiconductor wafers continues to advance, thereby increasing the demand for a high-speed, nondestructive and high-resolution measurement technique. We propose a novel optical inspecting method for a microfabricated structure using the standing wave illumination (SWI) shift as such a measurement technique. This method is based on a super-resolution algorithm in which the inspection system's resolution exceeds the diffraction limit by shifting the SWI. Resolution beyond the diffraction limit has previously been studied theoretically and realized experimentally. The influence of various experimental error factors needs to be investigated and calibration needs to be performed accordingly when actual applications that utilize the proposed method are constructed. These error factors include errors related to the phase, pitch and shift step size of the standing wave. Identifying the phase accurately is extremely difficult and greatly influences the resolution result. Hence, the SWI phase was focused upon as an experimental error factor. The effect of the phase difference between the actual experimental standing wave and the computationally set standing wave was investigated using a computer simulation. The periodic structure characteristic of a microfabricated structure was analyzed. The following findings were obtained as a result. The influence of an error is divided into three modes depending on the pitch of the periodic structure: (1) if the pitch is comparatively small, the influence of the error is cancelled, allowing the structure of a sample to be resolved correctly; (2) if the pitch of the structure is from 150 to 350 nm, the reconstructed solution shifts in a transverse direction corresponding to a phase gap of SWI; and (3) if it is a comparatively large pitch, then it is difficult to reconstruct the right pitch. Verification was experimentally attempted for mode (2), and the same result as that for the simulation was obtained.