Luxtron Corporation

Daniel E Glenn

Mei H Sun

Herbert E Litvak

Earl M Jensen

Huey M Tzeng

Lin Jun Zhou

Frank J Hausman

In an apparatus for removing material from an article, such as an exposed surface of an intermediate integrated circuit structure, by planarizing, polishing, etching or the like, a sensor is mechanically coupled to a moving carrier of the article for directing through the article to its first side an electromagnetic radiation beam having a wavelength band to which the structure is substantially transparent. The beam is detected after interacting with the article, such as being reflected from its exposed surface, and resulting information of the state of the processing of the exposed surface is transmitted from the moving carrier to a stationary receiver by radiation without the use of any physical transmission media such as wires or optical fibers. Multiple sensors mounted on the moving article carrier provide information of the uniformity of the processing across the exposed article surface. The radiation signal received by the stationary receiver is used to monitor or control the processing, such as by determining an endpoint thereof.

In situ technique for monitoring and controlling a process of

A detector structure and technique for non-contact monitoring of a process being performed on a surface, such as in semiconductor wafer integrated circuit processing and flat panel display substrate processing, in order to determine when the process has reached endpoint. In one embodiment, multiple small area radiation sources, such as light emitting diodes, are symmetrically arranged around a large area photodetector, and each have similar radiation distribution patterns. In an alternative embodiment, multiple photodetectors are symmetrically arranged around a single light emitting diode with a symmetrical radiation distribution pattern. In either case, the amount of source radiation reflected onto the detector from the surface being processed is not significantly affected by any wobble or tilting of the surface that may occur during processing.

Processing endpoint detecting technique and detector structure using

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Mountain View, CA, United States of America

Daniel E Glenn