The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Feb. 09, 2016
Filed:
Sep. 28, 2012
The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL (US);
Gabriel Popescu, Champaign, IL (US);
Lynford Goddard, Champaign, IL (US);
Chris Edwards, Mahomet, IL;
Amir Arbabi, Urbana, IL (US);
The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL (US);
Abstract
Methods and apparatus for method for characterizing a height profile of a scattering surface relative to a fiducial plane. The scattering surface, which may be an interface between distinct solid, liquid, gaseous or plasma phases, is illuminated with substantially spatially coherent light, and light scattered by the scattering surface is collected and dispersed, such as by a grating, into zeroth- and first-order beams. A spatial Fourier transform of the zeroth- and first-order beams is created, and one of the beams is low-pass filtered. The beams are interfered at a focal plane detector to generate an interferogram, which is transformed to retrieve a spatially resolved quantitative phase image and/or an amplitude image of the scattering surface. Imaging may be performed during an etching process, and may be used to adaptively control a photoetching process in a feedback loop.