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    Manufacturing Science and Technology Monday Sessions
       Session MS-MoM

Invited Paper MS-MoM1
Optical Digital Profiling for Production Applications

Monday, October 29, 2001, 9:40 am, Room 131

Session: Metrology and Inspection for Manufacturing
Presenter: K. Barry, Timbre Technologies, Inc.
Authors: K. Barry, Timbre Technologies, Inc.
J. Kretzschmar, Timbre Technologies, Inc.
N. Jakatdar, Timbre Technologies, Inc.
Correspondent: Click to Email
As the industry drives down feature sizes, the need for more advanced characterization techniques becomes imperative. Gate lengths are quickly approaching the sub-one hundred-nanometer regime. Traditional techniques are not keeping pace with the precision and accuracy needs of the IC industry. Additionally, with the onset of 300mm wafer production, it will be imperative for tools to be able to measure critical parameters and adjust processing conditions on a wafer-by-wafer basis. The industry is experiencing a paradigm shift in critical dimension metrology. Optical Digital Profilometry (ODP), developed by Timbre Technologies Inc. (Fremont, Calif.), is an optical, nondestructive, in-line profile measurement methodology utilizing Maxwell's principles to generate digital cross-sectional representations of IC features. One advantage is that ODP has been proven extendible beyond the 70nm node by utilizing spectroscopic ellipsometry to measure physical structures with precision an order of magnitude better than currently available CD-SEMs. Another advantage lies in Optical Digital Profilometry's ability to generate digital cross-sectional information in real time enabling advanced process control (APC) of IC manufacturing lines. In this paper we present results from monitoring production wafers via ODP of shallow trench isolation (STI) structures at the post-etch, post-clean step, also referred to as final inspect (FI). These results show ODP to be a viable method for in-line CD, depth, and profile metrology, with sub-nm repeatability and excellent correlation to XSEM and CD-SEM.