L.H.A. Leunissen, IMEC, Leuven, Belgium, G. F. Lorusso, T. DiBiase, H. Yang & A. Azordegan, KLA-Tencor Corporation, San Jose, CA, USA

ABSTRACT

A variety of LER estimators, such as standard deviation, peak-to-valley, average, correlation length and Fourier analysis, have been implemented on-line on CD-SEM, thus allowing fully automated LER monitoring. The algorithms were tested on e-beam written LER standards (both deterministic and random), demonstrating good performance in terms of precision and accuracy. This approach was used to investigate experimentally LER transfer to etch.