Identifying the type of line edge roughness using grazing-incidence X-ray fluorescence

摘要

The increasing complexity and decreasing sizes of nanostructures in microelectronic devices challenge the existing metrology methods. Moreover, as the dimensions of nanostructures continue to decrease, the overall effect of imperfections increases. For lithographic lamellar gratings, the most characteristic type of roughness is line-edge roughness, which affects the uniformity of the line edge of the line. Grazing incidence X-Ray fluorescence (GIXRF) is a non-destructive, ensemble and element sensitive method with high sensitivity to the line shapes of lamellar nanostructures. However, the effect of line-edge roughness on the angular distribution of the GIXRF is unknown. Here, the effect of line-edge roughness of lamellar gratings on the GIXRF intensity is investigated using a series of test samples with different artificial line-edge roughness profiles. We observed that the angular distribution of the GIXRF intensity is affected by the roughness.