A dedicated calibration standard for nanoscale areal surface texture measurements

• Published in: Microelectronic engineering 2015-06, Vol.141, p.250-255
• Main Authors: Koops, Richard, van Veghel, Marijn, van de Nes, Arthur
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Calibration; Instrumentation; Nanostructure; Preserves; Quality assessment; Scanning; Surface layer; Texture
• ISSN: 0167-9317
• DOI: 10.1016/j.mee.2015.04.021

Assessing product quality already during manufacturing is vital in order to optimize production processes, increase product quality, reduce waste and preserve resources. Product quality can be assessed by measuring specific product characteristics that are correlated to the quality, i.e. critical to quality parameters. Currently, product features and characteristics are entering the nanoscale domain and require increasingly accurate measurement instrumentation to inspect and validate product quality. Accurate calibration of instrumentation at the nanometer length scale has therefore become increasingly important to substantiate the validity of measurements on manufactured products. Although calibration standards are available for some application dedicated calibration standards for specific application are usually not available and have to be designed, manufactured and calibrated. In order to enable accurate calibration the nanoscale, we have designed and realized a calibration standard to calibrate instrumentation for the areal surface texture parameter Sq. The realized standard has been optimized for scanning probe applications. A method for the calibration of the standard itself is demonstrated resulting in sub nanometer measurement uncertainty of the standard.