High-speed Near-surface Tracking for Fast Atomic Force Microscope Scan Switching Based on the Squeeze Film Damping Effect
Atomic force microscope (AFM) is a crucial metrology tool in the semiconductor industry. However, the bottleneck of the AFM technique is its low efficiency, primarily owing to the time-consuming scanning point switching. The traditional method takes approximately one minute for a single switching. T...
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Published in | IEEE transactions on industrial electronics (1982) Vol. 71; no. 2; pp. 1 - 10 |
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Main Authors | , , , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
New York
IEEE
01.02.2024
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE) |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Atomic force microscope (AFM) is a crucial metrology tool in the semiconductor industry. However, the bottleneck of the AFM technique is its low efficiency, primarily owing to the time-consuming scanning point switching. The traditional method takes approximately one minute for a single switching. To shield the probe and sample, the switching should first lift the probe a considerable distance, move it to the next point, and finally engage the probe slowly to the sample surface. We propose a near-surface tracking method for use in fast scanning point switching. The probe-sample distance was sensed by the squeeze air film damping effect, and the probe was kept at a small constant height during the switching via feedback control. The method can decrease the lift and engage distance from approximately 1 mm to 5 μm, which was two order of reduction; thereby shortening the single switching time from 45 s to 6.1 s, which is an 87% reduction. Generally, the fast switching method can improve the measurement efficiency of the existing AFM working in the air, but it can not be used in liquid and vacuum. Furthermore, the proposed squeeze film damping effect based distance sensing method can be applied in various fields, such as vibration sensing and temperature drift measurement. |
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ISSN: | 0278-0046 1557-9948 |
DOI: | 10.1109/TIE.2023.3250848 |