Massively parallel solution of the inverse scattering problem for integrated circuit quality control
- Sandia National Labs., NM (United States)
- Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM (United States). Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Dept.
The authors developed and implemented a highly parallel computational algorithm for solution of the inverse scattering problem generated when an integrated circuit is illuminated by laser. The method was used as part of a system to measure diffraction grating line widths on specially fabricated test wafers and the results of the computational analysis were compared with more traditional line-width measurement techniques. The authors found they were able to measure the line width of singly periodic and doubly periodic diffraction gratings (i.e. 2D and 3D gratings respectively) with accuracy comparable to the best available experimental techniques. They demonstrated that their parallel code is highly scalable, achieving a scaled parallel efficiency of 90% or more on typical problems running on 1024 processors. They also made substantial improvements to the algorithmics and their original implementation of Rigorous Coupled Waveform Analysis, the underlying computational technique. These resulted in computational speed-ups of two orders of magnitude in some test problems. By combining these algorithmic improvements with parallelism the authors achieve speedups of between a few thousand and hundreds of thousands over the original engineering code. This made the laser diffraction measurement technique practical.
- Research Organization:
- Sandia National Labs., Albuquerque, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Research, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC04-94AL85000
- OSTI ID:
- 534506
- Report Number(s):
- SAND--97-2330; ON: DE98000423
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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