Patent ID: 7235988

Claim:
A method of high contrast imaging of semiconductor and metallic sites in an integrated circuit (IC) that simultaneously produces two separate exclusive high-contrast images of said IC from one light source, the method comprising: exciting said IC with a focused excitation beam from a light source; transversely and axially scanning said IC by said focused excitation beam; producing simultaneously a high-contrast confocal reflectance image i r (x, y, z) and a low contrast one-photon optical beam-induced current image (1P-OBIC) i s (x, y) of said IC; deriving a first exclusive high-contrast image s(x, y, z) of said semiconductor sites of said IC from a pixel to pixel product of said 1P-OBIC image and said confocal reflectance image using the equation: s(x, y, z)=i r (x, y, z)i s (x, y) where s(x, y, z)>0; and deriving a second exclusive high-contrast image m(x, y, z) of said metallic sites of said IC from a product of a complementary to said 1P-OBIC image and said confocal reflectance image using the equation: m(x, y, z)=i r (x, y, z)i m (x, y) where i m (x, y)=κ−i s (x, y) and κ is a constant that represents the highest s(x, y, z) value that is possible for a given optical set-up.