In-plane calibration for AFM

Abstract

Currently, the x, y scale and the orthogonality of atomic force microscopy (AFM) was independently calibrated by the traditional in-plane calibration methods. There exist theoretical errors because the other two error terms are neglected during the calibration of a certain error term. It has been found that the traditional calibration methods have a rather big theoretical error which is unbearable for nanometrology. In this paper, we propose a calibration method based on multi-measurement of a one-dimensional grating. The x, y scale and the orthogonality can be calibrated simultaneously. This new calibration method was also modified to eliminate the effect of AFM drift by keeping the parallelism between the slow scan direction of AFM and the grating lines of the one-dimensional grating.