The commercial success in micro-system technologies depends on a reliable and controlled mass production. Without a good quality assurance and process control it is impossible to guarantee the specifications of the products and to minimize the production costs. Among test equipment for the function of the end product it is necessary to introduce dimensional metrology devices for checking vertical and lateral structures in silicon or PMMA materials close to production machines. Due to the small dimensions of HARMS or MOEMS components, traditional surface testers as mechanical stylus instruments are not able to analyze structures with high aspect ratio. In this paper a new approach to surface measurement technique, the confocal white light microscopy, is described which opens the possibility to measure soft or transparent materials from the nanometer up to the millimetre range. In contrast to other methods, like phase shift interferometry, the confocal measurement technique is nearly free of artefacts due to physical pinhole filter masks.
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