Novel combined measurement system to characterize film structures by spectral interferometry and ellipsometry.

We propose a novel measurement system to simultaneously measure surface and thickness profiles of thin film structures, which cannot be realized in typical measurement techniques. This measurement is accomplished by combining spectral interferometry and ellipsometry. These two distinct measurement techniques are involved in a single system by the abnormal optical configuration. Further, the measurement results are complementary in order to characterize film structures. Film thickness profiles are measured by spectroscopic imaging ellipsometry and surface profiles are obtained from the spectral phase by spectrally resolved interferometry. This method eliminates the theoretical spectral phase by film thicknesses. The proposed system can determine the dimensional film structures at once, even though they have multi-layered films, substrate textures, and even thin film layers. In the experiments, each measurement principle was fundamentally verified with standard specimens. Further, a 4-layered film specimen was measured in order to reconstruct its 3D film structure. As the result, the repeatability of spectroscopic imaging ellipsometry was less than 1 nm and that of spectrally resolved interferometry was a few nanometers, which dominantly affected the performance of the whole system. Several issues for improving accuracy and precision of the proposed system are also discussed in this paper.