Abstract
Critical Dimension Scanning Electron Microscope (CD-SEM) is widely used as a measurement tool of semiconductor patterns. It is necessary to set an image processing range for the measurement and to register the setting with a recipe every evaluation point. With increase of the number of the measurement points by the pattern miniaturization, burdens of the recipe creation increased. We propose a technique to generate the measurement recipe automatically based on design data of the pattern layout. The proposed method extracts all measureable pattern candidates by evaluating the positional relationship between each segment pair of design data. Next, the most suitable pattern for the measurement is decided relatively from the candidates. The proposed method was verified with 662 evaluation points and correct ratio of recipe generation and measurement using CD-SEM was 100% (662=662) compared with a manual operation. The recipe generation time for all evaluation points by the proposed method was 8 minutes. A large time shortening can be realized whereas the processing time of the manual operation was 3.5 hours.
