Abstract

With the ever more stringent demands of today’s ultra-high performance machinery such as optical/magnetic disk drives, digital video disk drives, etc., metrology tools that can meet a significant portion of these high performance devices are increasing in demand. The high accuracy and wide bandwidth characteristics of an interferometer make it a natural choice to meet such needs. However, it has been identified that a new breed of interferometer must be developed before interferometers can be adopted to measure ultra-high precision high-performance machinery with ease. The ideal features identified include: (1) no special treatments to measurement surfaces required, (2) absolute/differential vibration detection possible, (3) ability to accommodate samples with significantly different reflectivity, (4) nanometer resolutions, and (5) mega-hertz bandwidth^[1].

© 1998 Optical Society of America