The white-light scanning interferometer (WSI) is an effective optical measurement system for high-precision industries (e.g., flat-panel display and electronics packaging manufacturers) and semiconductor manufacturing industries. Its major disadvantages include a slow image-capturing speed for interferogram acquisition and a high computational cost for peak-detection on the acquired interferogram. Here, a WSI system is proposed for the semiconductor inspection process. The new imaging acquisition technique uses an ‘on-the-fly’ imaging system. During the vertical scanning motion of the WSI, interference fringe images are sequentially acquired at a series of pre-defined lens positions, without conventional stepwise motions. To reduce the calculation time, a parallel computing method is used to link multiple personal computers (PCs). Experiments were performed to evaluate the proposed high-speed WSI system.
