Image reconstruction techniques for high numerical aperture integrated circuit imaging

As feature sizes in integrated circuits (ICs) become smaller, higher-resolution defect detection and failure analysis techniques are required. The introduction of solid immersion lenses (SIL) has been an enabling technology for high-resolution backside IC imaging. High Numerical Aperture (NA) SIL imaging introduces properties of focused light which cannot be predicted by scalar beam optics. For example, spatial resolution can be manipulated in selected directions by modification of the polarization direction in linearly polarized light. In this work, we propose a unified framework combining multiple SIL microscopy images collected using polarizations at different directions in order to improve image reconstruction performance and ultimately resolution and defect localization. We show improvement in reconstruction quality by combining data taken using light with multiple polarizations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on experimental data.