A double-sided surface scanning platform for sapphire substrate quality assessment

With excellent mechanical and optical properties, sapphire substrate becomes a very important industrial material especially for LED manufacturing. Its quality control requires two tasks, double-sided surface profiling and defect detection. In this paper, a 3D surface scanning system is proposed as a platform for sapphire substrate inspection. During the scanning process, the height information of both upper and lower surfaces is measured by a chromatic confocal probe. For lateral positioning feedback, an in-house developed sensor, namely, image grating, is introduced in this paper. For these inspection processes, there are three challenges: 1) the motion error in the vertical direction, 2) simultaneous measurement of both upper and lower surfaces, and 3) lateral positioning error in a large scanning area. To address these challenges, three key technologies were developed: 1) real-time motion error compensation based on a fringe interferometer, 2) a double-sided measurement for transparent specimen without the pre-knowledge of its refractive index, and 3) planar image grating pair for accurate 2D displacement feedback. The experimental results showed that the proposed measurement system was able to achieve 50 nm accuracy of the standard deviation when measuring the step height of gauge blocks. When the system measured 4-inch double-sided polished sapphire substrate, the measurement repeatability of TTV (Total Thickness Variation) was within 60 nm; and that of warpage was within 10 nm. As a side product, refractive index can also be measured using the proposed system, and experimental results showed respectable consistency.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a 3D surface scanning system for the inspection of sapphire substrates, addressing challenges such as motion error, double-sided measurement, and lateral positioning error. The system achieves high precision measurement through the development of key technologies.