Research On Development And Application Of A High-precision Broadband Mueller Matrix Ellipsometer

With nanomanufacturing technique developing, the related industries, such as integrated circuit manufacture, panel display, and photovoltaic solar have become the key industries in the nation. It is of great importance for the fast, lowcost, nondestructive, precise and accurate measurement of the optical constant of materials, thickness of thin films, and structural parameters of nanostructures, in order to improve the production efficiency and product performance. Due to the limitation such as time-consuming, expensive, complex to be operated and destructive, the SEM, AFM and TEM tools are hard to realize on-line integrated measurement in nanomanufacturing process. In contrast, ellipsometry has drawn more and more attention in micro-nano metrology and process monitor in nanomanufacturing due to its advantages, such as high efficiency, inexpensive and non-contact.Compared with the conventional ellipsometer, which only obtains two ellipsometric parameters, i.e., the amplitude ratio and phase shift, the Mueller matrix ellipsometer (MME) can provide up to 16 quantities of a 4x4 Mueller matrix, and consequently can acquired much more useful information about the sample. Among various type of MME, the dual rotating-compensator (DRC) MME has become more and more popular mainly because its wide spectra range, high measurement speed, and easy to operate. In this dissertation, the equipment developing and application research of high-precision broadband DRC MME are explored, and the main contents and innovations include:The error sources, categorization and propagation in DRC MME are systematically investigated. The error propagation model of DRC MME is established, and the influence on the Mueller matrix measurement of the systematic errors and random errors are evaluated. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the validity of the established model.Both systematic parameters calibration method based on iterative solution combined with direct solution, and systematic model error correction method are proposed to deal with the systematic errors. Numerical simulations performed on a silicon dioxide film on the silicon substrate have demonstrated that the proposed calibration method can calibrate the systematic parameters in DRC MME with great accuracy, and the proposed correction method can fully correct the depolarization artifact introduced by the finite bandwidth and dispersion of the compensator, and thus achieve much more accurate Mueller matrix measurement.The domestic first high-precision broadband DRC MME equipment with independent intellectual property rights has been developed. The performance evaluation and third-party test report indicate that the performance of the developed DRC MME have reached up to the international standards.A series of applications have been carried out with the developed DRC MME. By taking full advantage of the developed DRC MME, such as the wide spectral range and rich information of the sample, experiments are performed on isotropic films, anisotropic films, curved films and nanostructures. The experiment results show that the developed DRC MME has excellent performance and promising application prospect.In summary, this dissertation systematically analyzed the errors of the DRC MME, proposed the corresponding systematical parameter calibration method and error correction method, developed the domestic first high-precision broadband DRC MME with independent intellectual property rights, and finally carried out a series of typical measurement applications. These works broke up the technological monopoly of high-end ellipsometry produces oversea, supplemented the blank in the filed of our country. It is expected that MME will have a bright application prospects in the filed of basic scientific research and nanomanufacturing industry such as photovoltaic solar, panel display and integrated circuit manufacture.