High Resolution Metrology and Simulation

The goal of our group “High-resolution measurement and simulation” is the investigation and development of optical measurement techniques that allow high-precision measurements in the subwavelength domain. In particular, our work focuses on the characterization of optical surfaces and volumes as well as technical surfaces in the field of semiconductor industry.

Today's accuracy requirements of optical metrology are two orders of magnitude beyond the diffraction limit. Hence, a precise understanding of the interaction of light with the studied structure is essential. The need to resolve structural details in the traditional sense may be increasingly replaced by a highly accurate model-based object reconstruction.

Our emphasis lies on the rigorous simulation of the actual light-structure interaction including the modeling of complete optical measurement processes. On the other hand, we experimentally investigate new and proven methods for metrology that use besides the intensity also the polarization and phase of the light as additional information channels to obtain maximum structural information accuracy. Our measurement methods include various microscopic methods as well as diffraction and polarization-resolved scatterometry.