Abstract

Increases in density of integration and concomitant reductions in minimum feature size have driven requirements for spatial resolution in analytical and metrological instrumentation for microelectronic structures to well below the limit set by far field diffraction of visible light. With the exception of scanned probe microscopy, analytical and metrological instruments with spatial resolutions adequate for the current generation of complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) structures all rely on ion or electron methods. Conventional ion or electron based methods are destructive and instrumentation has a high cost of ownership. Hence it is the goal of our work to develop nondestructive near field scanning optical microscopy/spectroscopy (NSOM/S) instrumentation and applications as an alternative to electron and ion methods. Imaging capabilities of near field scanning optical microscopy approach 0.02 µm and combined with spectroscopic analysis potentially provides chemical analysis of defects, particles, and thin films with ultra high spatial resolution.

© 1997 Optical Society of America