Improved micro topography measurement by LCoS-based fringe projection and z-stitching

Fringe projection is a commonly used method for 3D surface metrology. Numerous applications have demonstrated a measurement field from a few millimeters to several meters. To enable the measurement of micro systems with this method, a zoom stereo microscope from Leica was used as the basis for the implementation of a fringe projection microscope. A state of the art twisted nematic WUXGA LCD was used for flexible fringe generation. The high fill factor of this reflective LCoS in combination with a 500 Lumen LED and a 12 bit CCD camera delivers fringe patterns with high contrast. This allows us to measure objects with both a strong reflectivity variation and a low reflectivity. The second main objective was to increase the measurement field and the depth of field. Using the zoom system and exchangeable microscope objectives, the measurement fields could be changed quickly from 4 cm(2) to less than 1 min(2). Depending on the measurement field, the depth of field was between 5.22 mm and 0.0 18 mm. However, this was often not sufficient to measure the complete depth of a 3D-object. The microscope system also features an integrated high precision motor stage, which is already used for system calibration. Based on this, we implemented a new z-stitching method where n measurements at different well determined z-positions of the motor stage were performed. The n resulting topography maps can be stitched together to get the complete depth map of the entire object. Thus the depth measurement range is only limited by the mechanics of the z-stage.