23 December 2022 Trainable die-to-database for large field of view e-beam inspection
Kosuke Fukuda, Masanori Ouchi, Masayoshi Ishikawa, Yasuhiro Yoshida, Kaoru Fukaya, Ryugo Kagetani, Hiroyuki Shindo
Author Affiliations +
Abstract

Extreme ultraviolet lithography has advanced microfabrication of semiconductor devices toward the sub-10-nm generation. In this situation, stochastic defects increase and hence process evaluation requires an entire wafer inspection at high speed. To satisfy this requirement, a large field of view (FoV) inspection with low-resolution enables us to inspect an entire wafer within an acceptable time because the throughput of e-beam inspection depends on imaging resolution. However, low-resolution images are difficult to inspect at high precision using conventional methods because of a smaller photographed defect size and worse signal-to-noise ratio. Moreover, deformation caused by the manufacturing process and larger distortion caused by large FoV result in false detections when we apply die-to-database (D2DB) inspection. To solve these issues, we propose trainable D2DB inspection, which predicts a pixel-value distribution of normal images from a corresponding design layout. The proposed method is robust to low-resolution images because it considers noise and acceptable deformation as variance of the learned distribution. In addition, by introducing a model to predict a misalignment between a design layout and inspection image, trainable D2DB becomes robust to image distortion. Experiments show that trainable D2DB can perform high-precision inspection on images with large noise and image distortion.

© 2022 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)
Kosuke Fukuda, Masanori Ouchi, Masayoshi Ishikawa, Yasuhiro Yoshida, Kaoru Fukaya, Ryugo Kagetani, and Hiroyuki Shindo "Trainable die-to-database for large field of view e-beam inspection," Journal of Micro/Nanopatterning, Materials, and Metrology 22(2), 021004 (23 December 2022). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JMM.22.2.021004
Received: 13 September 2022; Accepted: 8 December 2022; Published: 23 December 2022
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KEYWORDS
Inspection

Distortion

Education and training

Design and modelling

Scanning electron microscopy

Deformation

Defect detection

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