Metal Thickness Measurement System Based on a Double-Coil Eddy-Current Method With Characteristic Ratio Detection

Abstract

Eddy-current sensor systems have been employed to determine the real-time thickness distribution of metal films and the thickness at endpoint detection in metal chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) processes, to achieve global planarization and avoid over-polishing or under-polishing. However, the large lift-off distance of 3.5 mm between the sensor coil and metal film gradually decreases with continuous wear of the polishing pad, which has a strong negative impact on the sensitivity and accuracy of the thickness measurement. In this study a double-coil eddy-current sensor system, with novel characteristic ratio detection capability, is proposed for metal film thickness measurement and compared with a traditional amplitude-based method. The linear relationship between the characteristic ratio and metal film thickness that is immune to lift-off distance is demonstrated both theoretically and experimentally. The experimental results show that the proposed method performs better than the amplitude-based method, reducing the effect of lift-off distance variation and obtaining an excellent linear measurement range from 24 to 2095 nm. The measurement accuracy is as high as 2.1 nm with an excitation frequency of 1.39 MHz and a large lift-off distance of 3.5 mm. The relative measurement error is less than 1.2% and the endpoint thickness ranges from 100 to 180 nm in the Cu-CMP process, when the lift-off distance varies from 3.6 to 3.3 mm.