Patent ID: 6940609

Claim:
An imaging method for detecting the topography of a sample's surface, the method comprising: (i) passing collimated illuminating light through a grating pattern formed by spaced-apart transparent regions spaced by non-transparent regions to an objective lens arrangement, focusing the illuminating light on the sample located in a focal plane of said objective lens arrangement, thereby illuminating the sample with light spatially modulated in accordance with the grating pattern; (ii) collecting light, specularly reflected from the sample, by said objective lens arrangement; and (iii) passing the collected specularly reflected light over a common path with the collimated illuminating light through the same grating pattern towards an imaging detector located at a conjugate plane of the sample, thereby enabling creation of an image of an illuminated region of the sample indicative of a local slope of the sample's surface within said region, and thereby indicative of the topography of the sample's surface within said illuminated region.