A Proposal of Sensitivity Optimization Method for Dark-field Particle Inspection Technique in Semiconductor Manufacturing

A method of improving particle size measurement accuracy has been developed by the correction of detected signals in dark-field particle detection technique. By this dark-field size measurement method, real-time particle size distribution measurement can be realized. A method of yield impact evaluation has been developed in which non-killer small particles are to be eliminated from all detected particles such that the yield impact is maximized. Extracting only killer particles from enormous amount of particles detected by high sensitivity particle inspection can be realized by this yield impact evaluation method. These methods are confirmed to be useful for a dark-field particle inspection on multi-layer films as a result of some experiments.