Mueller matrix imaging ellipsometry for nanostructure metrology.

In order to achieve effective process control, fast, inexpensive, nondestructive and reliable nanometer scale feature measurements are extremely useful in high-volume nanomanufacturing. Among the possible techniques, optical scatterometry is relatively ideal due to its high throughput, low cost, and minimal sample damage. However, this technique is inherently limited by the illumination spot size of the instrument and the low efficiency in construction of a map of the sample over a wide area. Aiming at these issues, we introduce conventional imaging techniques to optical scatterometry and combine them with Mueller matrix ellipsometry based scatterometry, which is expected to be a powerful tool for the measurement of nanostructures in future high-volume nanomanufacturing, and propose to apply Mueller matrix imaging ellipsometry (MMIE) for nanostructure metrology. Two kinds of nanostructures were measured using an in-house developed Mueller matrix imaging ellipsometer in this work. The experimental results demonstrate that we can achieve Mueller matrix measurement and analysis for nanostructures with pixel-sized illumination spots by using MMIE. We can also efficiently construct parameter maps of the nanostructures over a wide area with pixel-sized lateral resolution by performing parallel ellipsometric analysis for all the pixels of interest.