Consideration and compensation of calibration falloff for optical flying height measurement

Abstract In sub-10 nm low flying height (FH) region, system calibration is a significant challenge to achieve precise FH measurement. Unloading calibration mechanism is utilized for every FH measurement using three-wavelength interferometry. Our experiment has shown that the cutoff frequency of photodetectors and the bandwidth of optical filters induce calibration falloff during the calibration process. As a result, the FH measured is underestimated, i.e., the FH measured is lower than its true value. In this paper, mathematical models are proposed to eliminate the side effects due to the bandwidth of optical filters and the cutoff frequency of photodetectors. Results indicate that the proposed compensation schemes are effective in terms of improving the calibration accuracy.