Patent ID: 7184928

Claim:
In a semiconductor wafer inspection system, a method of determining a size of a defect on a semiconductor wafer surface, said method being performable by a processor executing at least one program out of a memory for processing data samples corresponding to said wafer surface defect, said data samples being represented by a geometric Gaussian shape in three dimensional space, said method comprising the steps of: defining a plurality of cross-sectional areas of the Gaussian shape, each cross-sectional area corresponding to a respective intermediate height of the Gaussian shape; in a first determining step, determining a respective value of each defined cross-sectional area of the Gaussian shape; in a second determining step, determining a respective value of the natural logarithm of each intermediate height of the Gaussian shape; in a third determining step, determining a natural logarithm of the height value corresponding to a zero cross-sectional area value based on a substantially linear function of the cross-sectional area values versus the natural logarithm of the intermediate height values; in a fourth determining step, determining the inverse natural logarithm of the value determined in the third determining step to obtain a value of a full height of the Gaussian shape, wherein the value of the full height of the Gaussian shape corresponds to a value of the size of said wafer surface defect detected on a semiconductor wafer surface using a surface scanning laser beam; and storing said value of the size of said wafer surface defect in said memory.