Abstract
Scatterometry is a well established technique currently utilized in research, as well as in industrial applications, to retrieve the properties of a given scatterer (the target) by looking at how the light coming from a certain source is diffracted in the far field. Currently the light source is often a discharge lamp that, after wavelength filtering, can be thought as a quasi-monochromatic, but spatially incoherent, source. In the present work, benefits of using a focused spot from a spatially coherent light source, as that emitted by a laser, are investigated on a theoretical viewpoint. The focused spot is scanned over the object of interest and, for each scan position, a far-field diffraction pattern is recorded. Our results show that spatially coherent light can sensibly increase the accuracy of the technique with respect to the target’s geometrical profile.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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El Gawhary, O., Kumar, N., Pereira, S.F. et al. Performance analysis of coherent optical scatterometry. Appl. Phys. B 105, 775–781 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00340-011-4794-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00340-011-4794-7