Practical common-path heterodyne surface profiling interferometer with automatic focusing

In modern semiconductor and optics industries, there is a strong demand for a highly sensitive and non-contact surface profilometer. This paper describes a practical heterodyne surface profiling interferometer for on-line non-contact measurement which has been developed recently. The essential feature of the profilometer is a newly designed common-path configuration to minimize the effects caused by vibration, air turbulence and other environmental variations. A single-mode frequency-stabilized laser diode (780 nm) serves as the light source to make the whole system compact (total volume 250L×200W×100H mm). A powerful signal processing scheme is also developed, which includes three parts: automatic voltage control, phase measurement with wide range and automatic focusing control. All these make the repeatability and stability of the profiling interferometer greatly improved. The system has vertical resolution of 0.39 nm and lateral resolution of 0.73 μm. During approximately an hour, the stability is within 1.95 nm(3σ).