Line edge roughness metrology using atomic force microscopes

Orji, Ndubuisi G.; Vorburger, Theodore V.; Fu, Joseph; Dixson, Ronald G.; Nguyen, Cattien V.; Raja, J.

doi:10.1088/0957-0233/16/11/004

Cited by 39 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…These new developments, along with the advanced electronics for servo control, made this new AFM an appropriate tool for CD and LER/LWR measurements. First applications of the CD-AFM to LER metrology were limited by the large radius of the used tip (120 nm) (Orji et al ., 2005). More systematic measurements with smaller tip radius (50 nm) of the effects of acid diffusion length (ADL) and etching steps on LER/ LWR were also performed and partially compared with the results of the more mature CD-SEM measurements (Foucher et al ., 2007;Pargon et al ., 2008).…”

Section: Cd-afmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sidewall roughness in nanolithography: origins, metrology and device effects

2014

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Section: Cd-afmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sidewall roughness in nanolithography: origins, metrology and device effects

2014

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“…Over the past decade, a lot of works on AFM developments tried to improve the scan precision and accuracy for steep sidewall samples from different aspects. Orji et al [5] designed a "boot-shaped" tip which can easily scan the sidewall of the sample. Ju et al [6] proposed a scanning system with a tilting stage that can rotate the sample to change the relative angle between probe and sample, thus accessing the detailed information near the sidewall of the sample.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effective Tilting Angles for a Dual Probes AFM System to Achieve High-Precision Scanning

Lin

et al. 2016

IEEE/ASME Trans. Mechatron.

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Because of the everlasting promotion of micro/nano-fabrication techniques, the measurement of the feature contour of micro/nano-fabricated structures become an important issue. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a high accuracy measurement instrument that has been frequently used in measuring of micro/nano-fabricated structures. However, most conventional AFM systems use a single probe with a monotonic tilting angle to scan all kinds of sample profiles. This type of AFM design easily suffers from the so-called "side wall effect", and the scanning result will induce a distortion phenomenon at the corner part. To solve this problem, a novel dual probe AFM system is proposed in this paper. A highly flexible system structure is adopted in this work to create different tilting angle of each probe. With the method developed for obtaining the appropriate tilting angle, we set up the so-called "effective tilting angles" under different scanning scenarios. In addition, a useful merging method has been developed to stitch together the scanning results from two different probes out of two different scanning units. For scanning a standard grating, the error of sidewall angle from the scan image decreases form 27.3 % to 4.5 % when our method is compared with a traditional scan. Finally, by integrating the proposed scan method with a new raster based local scan strategy, we can achieve a high-throughput precision scan. In the scan of human blood cells, we not only can remove unnecessary scan area up to 61.04 % but also can improve sidewall distortion. A comprehensive series of experiments have been conducted to validate the scanning capability of the proposed methods on our self-developed AFM system.

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“…A carbon nanotube (CNT) has been proposed as a CD-AFM probe tip [11], and a batch process for large-scale fabrication of CNT tips for AFM imaging applications was reported. That process combined nanopatterning and nanomaterial synthesis by using traditional silicon micromachining technologies [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

General algorithm and method for scanning a via hole by using critical-dimension atomic force microscopy

Seo

Park

Kim

et al. 2014

Journal of the Korean Physical Society

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As semiconductor devices currently are integrated with high density, they are converted into 3-dimensional form. The interconnections between the layers of the devices are linked through via holes which have diameters of a few hundred nanometers and depths on a micrometer scale, typically. This kind of deep via hole scanning in 3 dimension has become a key issue in semiconductor industry. The only non-destructive method to image it directly is critical-dimension atomic force microscopy (CD-AFM) with a long probing tip. The concept of CD-AFM was suggested by other groups, but a substantial scanning algorithm has not been released yet. We suggest an algorithm, which is composed of a raster scanning and a vector scanning, for scanning samples including many via holes. If a feedback scheme with amplitude-detection mode is used, 3-dimensional scanning can be completed within a few conventional raster scannings.

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Line edge roughness metrology using atomic force microscopes

Cited by 39 publications

References 18 publications

Sidewall roughness in nanolithography: origins, metrology and device effects

Sidewall roughness in nanolithography: origins, metrology and device effects

Effective Tilting Angles for a Dual Probes AFM System to Achieve High-Precision Scanning

General algorithm and method for scanning a via hole by using critical-dimension atomic force microscopy

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