3D NAND Oxide/Nitride Tier Stack Thickness Measurements with Infrared Metrology

Three dimensional Not-And (3D NAND) flash memory devices are scaling in the vertical direction to more than 200 oxide/sacrificial wordline nitride layers to further increase storage capacity and enhance energy efficiency. The accurate measurement of the thicknesses of these layers is critical to controlling stress-induced wafer warping and pattern distortion. While traditional optical metrology in the UV-vis-NIR range offers a non-destructive inline solution for high volume manufacturing, we demonstrate in this paper, that mid-IR metrology has advantages in de-correlating oxide and nitride thicknesses owing to their unique absorption signatures. Furthermore, because of the differences in the oxide and nitride absorptions, the simulated measurement results show the ability to differentiate thickness variations in the vertical zones. Compared with results obtained with the UV-vis-NIR spectra, machine learning models could resolve oxide and nitride thickness DOE conditions with less RMSE and less in-wafer variation.