Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Quantitative tool characterization of a 193 nm scatterfield microscope

Published

Author(s)

Martin Y. Sohn, Bryan M. Barnes, Hui Zhou, Richard M. Silver

Abstract

Optical microscope tool characterization has been investigated for the quantitative measurements of deep sub-wavelength features using a Fourier plane normalization method. The NIST 193 nm scatterfield microscope operating with an ArF Excimer laser, which has a capability of articulating the angular incident beam at the sample plane using an aperture scanning at the conjugate back focal plane (CBFP), was characterized through the illumination and collection optical paths. Each incident cone beam at the sample plane can be approximated as a plane wave as in Köhler configuration, simplifying the analysis of the scattered light induced by the discrete illumination beam at the sample plane. Under this approximation, the illumination and entire tool function sets were measured at the sample and imaging CCD planes, respectively, allowing computation of the collection tool function set. The two sets of optical tool functions will be used to normalize scattering simulations in the Fourier space domain of the CCD image in the collection path. We simulated aspects of the beam distributions of the illumination beam at the sample plane with respect to the change of the optical components and report experimental illumination and collection tool function distributions that were obtained by angular scanning of an aperture at the conjugate back focal plane.
Volume
9556
Conference Dates
August 9-13, 2015
Conference Location
San Diego, CA
Conference Title
Nanoengineering: Fabrication, Properties, Optics, and Devices XII

Keywords

Quantitative microscope characterization, uncertainty, scatterfield microscopy, tool function, optical metrology

Citation

Sohn, M. , Barnes, B. , Zhou, H. and Silver, R. (2015), Quantitative tool characterization of a 193 nm scatterfield microscope, Nanoengineering: Fabrication, Properties, Optics, and Devices XII, San Diego, CA, [online], https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2188224 (Accessed March 28, 2024)
Created September 9, 2015, Updated November 10, 2018