Development of a wafer warpage measurement technique using Moiré-based method

This paper reports on a novel technique for measuring wafer warpage, using the design concepts of moiré shift, digital moiré, autocollimator, and the scanning profiling method. The measurement system is divided into two parts: an optical moiré system and a phase analysis system. The optical arrangement can be adjusted to control the projection of a linear grating image onto the surface of a wafer to be reflected back into a CCD camera. The grating image acquired by the CCD camera is used for measurement whereas a reference grating image is obtained using the digital moiré method. By overlapping the two images of the measurement and the reference gratings, the corresponding moiré fringes are formed. The phase of the moiré fringes will change proportionally to the degree of warpage in the wafer, which can be measured by detecting variations in the phase shift of the moiré fringes in the scanning profile across the surface of the entire wafer. Measurement resolution can be controlled by adjusting the pitch size of the grating or the focal length of the focusing lens, or by adjusting the angle between the images of the measurement and reference gratings. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to achieve an angular resolution of 0.2 μrad. As compared to the current warpage measurement techniques, the proposed method has the ability of high measurement resolution, high stability, and high flexibility.