Abstract

Nonlinear Optical Polymers developed for electro-optical and all-optical signal processing applications offer a unique opportunity for the inspection of future generations of silicon based electronic and optoelectronic devices with feature sizes in the 100 nm range and radiated fields with bandwidth in excess of 100 GHz. The need for such resolutions is anticipated by the year 2010. We demonstrate that such high resolutions are compatible with modern nonlinear polymers, ultrafast lasers and high-resolution optical metrology. We demonstrate that under two-photon resonance enhancement, centrosymmetric thin films less than 100 nm thick are capable of mapping low frequency fields at the surface of a semiconductor device with sensitivities in excess of 1 mV/µm and sub-micron resolution.

© 1999 Optical Society of America