ABSTRACT
The well-established structural methods of x-ray specular and diffuse scattering are less widely used in semiconductor metrology than their capababilities would suggest. We describe some technical enhancements that make these highly useful tools even more accessible and productive. These enhancements include improvements in beam-forming optics combined with channel-crystal analysis of reflected/scattered x-rays and high-rate detectors to allow more efficient and informative x-ray measurements covering a wide range of thin-layer structures. We also introduce some methods of wavelet analysis that appear to offer useful qualitative structural insights as well as providing effective denoising of observed data.
