MICROSCALE METROLOGY USING STANDING WAVE PROBES

摘要

Miniaturization has been one of the driving forces in the development of new technologies leading to new products in a variety of industries. As a result, the integration of components over several orders of magnitude on the length scale poses enormous challenges for quality assurance and control [1][2]. Therefore, new solutions are necessary to meet the growing need for more challenging metrology tasks and metrology requirements in nano- and micro-technology. However, with miniaturization, new challenges arise such as the increased influence of adhesion, electrostatic, Van der Waals and meniscus forces that affect the measurement process [3]-[5]. Technical solutions to overcome these micro- and nano-metrology challenges will include the need for traceability, new calibration procedures and calibration artifacts [1][6]. Over the past decade many new metrology tools have been proposed [7][8], however; for contact-based measurements, adhesion between the measurement probe and the specimen still proves to be one of the more difficult challenges to overcome [6]. To address this issue, a new class of tactile sensing probe referred to as standing wave sensor has been developed and was previously presented [9]. Previous work introduced the principle of operation of the standing wave senor. This work presents new measurements showing applications of the standing wave probe as the sensing element in a microscale high aspect ratio profiling system.