Thin-film thickness profile measurement by three-wavelength interference color analysis

Conventional transparent film thickness measurement methods such as spectroscopy are essentially capable of measuring only a single point at a time, and their spatial resolution is limited. We propose a film thickness measurement method that is an extension of the global model-fitting algorithm developed for three-wavelength interferometric surface profiling. It estimates the film thickness distribution from an interference color image captured by a color camera with three-wavelength illumination. The proposed method is validated through computer simulations and experiments. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America