Computational methods estimating uncertainties for profile reconstruction in scatterometry

The solution of the inverse problem in scatterometry, i.e. the determination of periodic surface structures from light diffraction patterns, is incomplete without knowledge of the uncertainties associated with the reconstructed surface parameters. With decreasing feature sizes of lithography masks, increasing demands on metrology techniques arise. Scatterometry as a non-imaging indirect optical method is applied to periodic line-space structures in order to determine geometric parameters like side-wall angles, heights, top and bottom widths and to evaluate the quality of the manufacturing process. The numerical simulation of the diffraction process is based on the finite element solution of the Helmholtz equation. The inverse problem seeks to reconstruct the grating geometry from measured diffraction patterns. Restricting the class of gratings and the set of measurements, this inverse problem can be reformulated as a non-linear operator equation in Euclidean spaces. The operator maps the grating parameters to the efficiencies of diffracted plane wave modes. We employ a Gauss-Newton type iterative method to solve this operator equation and end up minimizing the deviation of the measured efficiency or phase shift values from the simulated ones. The reconstruction properties and the convergence of the algorithm, however, is controlled by the local conditioning of the non-linear mapping and the uncertainties of the measured efficiencies or phase shifts. In particular, the uncertainties of the reconstructed geometric parameters essentially depend on the uncertainties of the input data and can be estimated by various methods. We compare the results obtained from a Monte Carlo procedure to the estimations gained from the approximative covariance matrix of the profile parameters close to the optimal solution and apply them to EUV masks illuminated by plane waves with wavelengths in the range of 13 nm.