Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

We suggest and describe the use of a binary pseudo-random (BPR) grating as a standard test surface for measurement of the modulation transfer function (MTF) of interferometric microscopes. Knowledge of the MTF of a microscope is absolutely necessary to convert the measured height distribution of a surface undergoing metrology into an accurate power spectral density (PSD) distribution. For an 'ideal' microscope with an MTF function independent of spatial frequency out to the Nyquist frequency of the detector array with zero response at higher spatial frequencies, a BPR grating would produce a flat 1D PSD spectrum, independent of spatial frequency. For a 'real' instrument, the MTF is found as the square root of the ratio of the PSD spectrum measured with the BPR grating to the 'ideal,' spatial frequency independent, PSD spectrum. We present the results from a measurement of the MTF of MicromapTM-570 interferometric microscope demonstrating a high efficiency for the calibration method.