The authors present ne applications for the recently developed nori-contact optical inicrotopographer emphasizing the results of topographic inspections of thin silver films edges. These films were produced by sputtering of silver through different masks, using a planar magnetron source. The results show the influence ot the thickness and position of the masks on the topography of the film near its edge. Topographic information is obtained from the horizontal shift incurred by the bright spot on an horizontal surface, which is displaced vertically, when this is illuminated by an oblique collimated laser beam. The laser beam is focused onto the surface into a diffraction limited spot and is made to sweep the surface to be examined.. The horizontal position of the bright spot is continuously imaged onto a light detector array and the information about individual detectors that are activated is used to compute the corresponding horizontal shift on the reference plane. Simple trignometric calculations are used to relate the horizontal shift to the distance between the surface and a reference plane at each sampling point and thus a map of the surface topography can be built.

Date Published: 1 January 1991
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 1332, Optical Testing and Metrology III: Recent Advances in Industrial Optical Inspection, (1 January 1991); doi: 10.1117/12.51104

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1332:
Optical Testing and Metrology III: Recent Advances in Industrial Optical Inspection
Chander Prakash Grover, Editor(s)