Acoustic techniques for thin film thickness measurement in semiconductor processing

In modern semiconductor manufacturing, process monitoring and control are important issues limited at the present time by a lack of sensors and instrumentation capable of measuring process parameters like film thickness. In order to address this problem, two novel systems for thin film thickness measurement in semiconductor processing based upon contacting acoustic techniques have been developed. Both of these systems couple acoustic energy into the wafer via a nondestructive Hertzian contact and achieve high resolution by exciting and receiving ultrasonic signals from a ZnO transducer with microwave frequency electronics. The basic physical mechanism for film thickness determination is to analyze reflected waves due to acoustic impedance mismatches between various material layers on a silicon substrate.The first system requires frontside contacting of a sapphire buffer rod to an opaque film deposited on a silicon wafer and involves the use of broadband, high frequency pulse-echo electronics in the 0.5-5 GHz range. With this system, ex-situ measurements of aluminum and gold thin films on a silicon substrate have been done in the 0.25-2.5 The second system requires backside contacting of a sapphire buffer rod to a silicon wafer, which is in a vacuum station, and involves monitoring the changes in phase of CW 1-2 GHz acoustic waves as a function of frontside film growth. Using this technique, in-situ indium and aluminum film thickness monitoring has been done in both evaporator and sputtering environments with a resolution of 40 A. Temperature experiments in an oven have shown a resolution of 0.05 K for the sapphire buffer rod. Finally, multistep processing has been done and a multilayer film structure has been measured. Possible applications for this technique include deposition endpoint detection, simultaneous film thickness and temperature process monitoring, and trench depth measurement in etching environments.