A Characterization Method of Thin Film Parameters Based on Adaptive Differential Evolution Algorithm

• Main Authors: Lihua Lei, Yuqing Guan, Yanhua Zeng, Lin Zhao, Zhangning Xie, Zhiguo Han, Chengming Cao, Yunxia Fu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2021-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Nanotechnology; ellipsometry; algorithms; calibration
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9459694/

According to the transmission mode of polarized light in Mueller ellipsometry, a characterization method for the thickness and optical constants of isotropic nano films based on Self-Adaptive Differential Evolution algorithm (SADE) is proposed. By establishing the least square model of the output light intensity with respect to the Mueller matrix of the standard sample to be measured, the elements of the Mueller matrix are solved by using the Sade algorithm, and the Mueller spectral curve obtained by fitting is compared with that measured by DRC-MME, and the film thickness is calculated by using the transfer matrix. The SiO₂ / Si standard samples with calibration values of 100.4 nm and 121.56 nm are simulated and calculated. The experiment shows that: when numbers of iterations accumulated to 65 and 80 respectively, the residual square sum of the light intensity of the objective function converges to the minimum values of 1.24 and 1.02. The calculated film thickness values are 101.25nm and 120.53nm respectively, and the relative errors are both less than 1%. It proves the characteristics of simple calculation, fast convergence and accurate global optimal solution.