Design and Analysis of a Receiver-Transmitter Optical System for a Displacement-Measuring Laser Interferometer

We present a new type of receiver-transmitter optical system that can be adapted to the sensor head of a displacement-measuring interferometer. The interferometer is utilized to control positioning error and repetition accuracy of a wafer, down to the order of 1 nm, in a semiconductor manufacturing process. Currently, according to the tendency of scale-up of wafers, an interferometer is demanded to measure a wider range of displacement. To solve this technical problem, we suggest a new type of receiver-transmitter optical system consisting of a GRIN lens-Collimating lens-Afocal lens system, compared to conventional receiver-transmitter using a single collimating lens. By adapting this new technological optical structure, we can improve coupling efficiency up to about 100 times that of a single conventional collimating lens.