Small Angle X-ray Scattering Metrology for Sidewall Angle and Cross Section of Nanometer Scale Gratings

Copyright © (2004) American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics

Fabrication of nano-structures requires non-destructive metrologies capable of not only measuring the pattern size but also the pattern shape profile. This demand will become more stringent as the feature size shrinks to tens of nanometers, where tolerances of pattern shape will be measured in nanometers. Previously we have demonstrated that a small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) based technique has the capability of characterizing the average pitch size and pattern width to sub-nanometer precision. In this study, we further develop a protocol to extract the cross-section information of grating patterns, such as the average sidewall angle and pattern height. The appropriate reciprocal space map is probed by measuring diffraction peak intensities when the sample is rotated around the axis perpendicular to its grating direction. As an additional part of the sidewall angle determination, rotation of the sample also allows a precise determination of the pattern height.

By: Tangjiao Hu, Ronald L. Jones, Wen-li Wu, Eric K. Lin, Qinghuang Lin, John Quintana

Published in: Journal of Applied Physics, volume 96, (no 4), pages 2365-73 in 2004

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