The aggressive reduction of semiconductor device dimensions drives many improvements in optical wafer metrology. Currently, chips with device feature sizes below 10 nm are in production which requires robust overlay metrology with sub-nm precision. We will present a compact dark-field Digital Holographic Microscope (df-DHM) that is able to measure overlay on small metrology targets from visible to infrared wavelengths. The coherent amplification and the aberration correction capabilities that is offered by df-DHM allow robust overlay metrology even on weak targets that are covered by absorbing layers. Measured data will be shown that demonstrate the capabilities of this metrology concept.
Background: Integrated circuits are fabricated layer by layer. It is crucial to their performance that these layers are well aligned to each other, and any undesired translation of a layer is called overlay. Thus far, overlay measurements have been limited to visible wavelengths, but the use of materials that are opaque to visible wavelengths necessitates measurements using infrared light.
Aim: We set out to demonstrate that an overlay sensor based on digital holographic microscopy can perform such overlay measurement at infrared wavelengths, while maintaining functionality at visible wavelengths.
Approach: This was done by constructing a breadboard setup that is capable of measuring overlay at wavelengths ranging from 400 to 1100 nm.
Results: Using the setup, we demonstrated good linearity between an applied amount of overlay and the measured amount. In addition, we demonstrated that the setup is only sensitive to structures at the top of the wafer. Measurements are therefore unaffected by the fact that Si is transparent at 1100 nm.
Conclusions: These results demonstrate the viability of an overlay sensor that is sensitive to visible and infrared light, allowing more freedom in choice of materials for integrated circuits.
Digital holographic microscopy allows access to the complex electric field, enabling computational propagation of light. This enables computational corrections for lens aberrations, which remove the requirement for antireflective coatings on the lens and enable imaging over a wide spectral range. This makes digital holographic microscopy an interesting candidate for overlay metrology on semiconductor wafers. We show that a single holographic image contains all data that is required for computing the overlay, by using a source with a limited coherence length and incoherently adding multiple measurements on a camera. As an additional benefit we show that such parallel acquisition improves the reproducibility of the experiment by eliminating noise sources that are common to the two measurements that typically constitute a single overlay measurement.
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