Two PhD positions on electromagnetic modeling for wafer metrology

Functieomschrijving

The two PhD positions are four-year salaried positions, as part of government funded programs in close collaboration with the industry, among which ASML and VSL. The PhD positions lead to a doctorate degree, the equivalent of an international PhD degree. PhD programs are embedded in the TU/e Graduate School.

Context of the PhD projects

Our modern information-based society has largely been built on two pillars: the information itself and the technological means to access, store, and process this information. The enormous growth in the stream of information has been made possible by the giant technological progress in the production of integrated circuits (ICs), that nowadays form the technology backbone of our information society. This progress is commonly known as 'Moore's law', and it embodies five decades of relentless innovation, research, and development in the semiconductor industry.

For successful and economically viable production of ICs, a key and critical ingredient is the ability to accurately measure and monitor the quality of each individual step of the production process and its alignment with respect to previous steps. Optical scatterometry is currently a widely used technique in high-volume manufacturing. For several technical reasons it is the most viable and cost-effective candidate for current and future high-quality high-throughput wafer-metrology. However, this technique critically depends on fast and accurate Maxwell solvers, which numerically solve Maxwell's equation to predict how light is scattered by structures on a wafer.

The two PhD projects together aim at the construction and demonstration of an advanced, accurate, and efficient Maxwell solver for optical metrology. This Maxwell solver needs to include cross-talk with product structures and coupling to the metrology sensor, and should be in line with state-of-the-art fast numerical modeling techniques recently developed at TU/e. This will address the urgent need for a next-generation Maxwell solver for optical scatterometry.

ASML (www.asml.com) is the world's leading provider of lithography systems for the semiconductor industry, manufacturing complex machines that are critical to the production of integrated circuits or microchips. Headquartered in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, ASML designs, develops, integrates, markets and services these advanced systems, which continue to help its customers - the major chipmakers - to reduce the size and increase the functionality of microchips, and consumer electronic equipment.

VSL (www.vsl.nl) is the Netherlands' national metrology institute and as such makes measurement results directly traceable to international standards. It provides a range of services including calibrations, and inter-laboratory comparisons. It has a branch dedicated to geometry metrology that includes measurements on a nanometer scale for the semiconductor industry.

Department of Electrical Engineering

The Department of Electrical Engineering is one of the nine departments of the Eindhoven University of Technology and provides BSc and MSc programs in Electrical Engineering. The department has nine research groups and has research collaborations with other departments at the Eindhoven University of Technology as well as with a large number of other universities and companies, both within the Netherlands and internationally. The department has approximately 350 employees and 900 students.

Electromagnetics Group at TU/e investigates the behavior of electromagnetic fields by computational, analytical and experimental techniques. The knowledge thus obtained is used in a wide range of applications from all areas of Electrical Engineering, with particular attention for antennas and propagation, wireless communication, nondestructive testing and sensing, optical interconnects, and (bio)-medical electromagnetics. The computational branch of the group is dedicated to developing modeling tools for high-tech systems, among which wafer metrology is a key field.

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