METHOD FOR DIGITALLY ANALYZING GROWTH OF PARTICLE ON SURFACE OF SEMICONDUCTOR WAFER USING SCANNING ELECTROMICROSCOPE IMAGE FILE

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a method for automatically calculating the growth degree of particles grown on the surface of a semiconductor wafer with a computer to grasp the same as a numerical value, and an apparatus therefor. SOLUTION: The electromicroscopic photograph of a predetermined region on the surface of the semiconductor wafer is stored in an indicated data base simultaneously with photographing. After this work is carried out with respect to all of measuring regions, an automatic digitizing program is performed. Automatic dizitization is performed by selecting an analytical region wherein a mesh is adapted to an analytical screen frame, and applying smoothing processing using the mean value of the image data of peripheral pixels to the respective cells of the region. Further, in order to eliminate the brightness difference between images, standarization processing is performed by image. The image data value of each of the pixels of the standardized image is compared with a predetermined threshold value to add the number of pixels exceeding the threshold value and a ratio of the added number of pixels, and the total number of pixels constituting an image to be analized is digitized to embody the growth degree of particles.