Photonics Spectra

UV Imaging Reveals Useful Details — at a Cost

UV Imaging Reveals Useful Details — at a Cost Article in Photonics Spectra

Feature sizes of modern electronics continue to shrink, approaching or even surpassing the wavelength of light, and equipment manufacturers are looking for new ways to improve the optical resolution of their systems to inspect ever smaller structures. One way to do this is by reducing the wavelength of the illumination.

While in the past this has moved the light source to the blue end of the visible spectrum, some applications are shifting into the near UV, the deep UV (DUV), or even the extreme UV (EUV), with imaging in the visible and near-infrared (NIR) establishing applications in both machine vision and security applications.

As imaging plunges into the depths of the UV spectrum, today’s latest light sources, cameras, sensors, and lens components are being increasingly engineered for UV applications. To meet the challenges of working in the UV, component-makers are mixing advancements from commercial products with modified materials to engineer the latest generation of light sources, cameras, sensors and lens components for UV applications.

Read the October issue of Photonics Spectra magazine to find out about the latest advancements that are boosting the use of UV imaging in machine vision and beyond from several industry experts including Excelitas Senior imaging Product and Applications Scientist Gerhard Holst. According to Holst, “Now the penetration depth of the UV light is enough to generate charge carriers in the silicon, opening quantum efficiencies/sensitivities down to 193 nm and lower. With a proper coating and material, it is also possible to create image sensors that are sensitive down to 2 nm, which means extreme UV and soft x-ray.”

Read the article online at Photonics Spectra.