Thickness and Surface Measurement of Transparent Thin-Film Layers using White Light Scanning Interferometry Combined with Reflectometry

Surface profiling and film thickness measurement play an important role for inspection. White light interferometry is widely used for engineering surfaces profiling, but its applications are limited primarily to opaque surfaces with relatively simple optical reflection behavior. The conventional bucket algorithm had given inaccurate surface profiles because of the phase error that occurs when a thin-film exists on the top of the surface. Recently, reflectometry and white light scanning interferometry were combined to measure the film thickness and surface profile. These techniques, however, have found that many local minima exist, so it is necessary to make proper initial guesses to reach the global minimum quickly. In this paper we propose combing reflectometry and white light scanning interferometry to measure the thin-film thickness and surface profile. The key idea is to divide the measurement into two states; reflectometry mode and interferometry mode to obtain the thickness and profile separately. Interferogram modeling, which considers transparent thin-film, was proposed to determine parameters such as height and thickness. With the proposed method, the ambiguity in determining the thickness and the surface has been eliminated. Standard thickness specimens were measured using the proposed method. Multi-layered film measurement results were compared with AFM measurement results. The comparison showed that surface profile and thin-film thickness can be measured successfully through the proposed method.