nDSE-based overlay alignment: enabling technology for nanometrology and fabrication

Jun Gao; Carl Picciotto; Wei Wu; Inkyu Park; William M. Tong

doi:10.1117/12.656610

24 March 2006 nDSE-based overlay alignment: enabling technology for nanometrology and fabrication

Jun Gao, Carl Picciotto, Wei Wu, Inkyu Park, William M. Tong

Proceedings Volume 6152, Metrology, Inspection, and Process Control for Microlithography XX; 615223 (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.656610
Event: SPIE 31st International Symposium on Advanced Lithography, 2006, San Jose, California, United States

Abstract

Displacement sensing and estimation (DSE) is important preprocessing task for many image-based processing systems that extract information from multiple images. In last two years, we gained significant insight of the nature of DSE and developed theory and algorithm framework named nanoscale displacement sensing and estimation (nDSE). We also build procedures to apply nDSE to overlay alignment down to the nanoscale. We will introduce two basic theories: Phase Delay Detection (PDD) and Derivatives-based Maximum Likelihood Estimation (DML) and associated DSE algorithms, noticeably Near-Neighbor-Navigation (N-Cubed) algorithm. We presented our best nDSE experimental result of 1 nm (1σ) while tracking 5 nm stepping. To develop nDSE-based nanoscale alignment, we introduced our definition of displacement, alignment and pseudo-displacement. We presented both theoretical and practical procedures to use nDSE to achieve nano-alignment down to the 10s of nano-meters and beyond. Then we compared nDSE-based nano-alignment to other industry standard alignment method and attempt to show the substantial advantages of nDSE based alignment in terms of cost and simplicity of the system design.

Citation Download Citation

Jun Gao, Carl Picciotto, Wei Wu, Inkyu Park, and William M. Tong "nDSE-based overlay alignment: enabling technology for nanometrology and fabrication", Proc. SPIE 6152, Metrology, Inspection, and Process Control for Microlithography XX, 615223 (24 March 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.656610

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