Abstract

An interferometric optical profiler using a Videk Megaplus camera interfacing to an 80386 based computer has been developed for measuring surface roughness and 3-D profiles at high resolution. The camera has 1320×1035 square pixels which are 6.8 µm on a side. Fields of view over 1024×1024 pixels can range from 35 to 4642 µm with spatial sampling intervals of 0.034-4.5 µm. With this camera the system is limited by the optical resolution and not the detector spacing. The computer system consists of an 80386 microprocessor and a floating point coprocessor, 16MB of RAM, and a VGA monitor with software running under Xenix 386. Digital data from the camera are captured using a frame grabber and displayed as live video on a monitor at 7 frames/s. The rms repeatability of measurements made with this instrument is better than 0.7 nm and can be half of this value with averaging.

© 1989 Optical Society of America