Notice of Intent to Noncompetitively Acquire Optical Microscope

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) intends to award a non-competitive contract to Nikon Metrology for an optical microscope. The microscope will be used for inspection of custom VLSI wafers both before and after addition of specialized devices by NIST personnel in NIST's CNST clean room and by research collaborators. The required microscope must meet specific minimum requirements, including having a collection of objectives, being compatible with brightfield, darkfield, and differential interference contrast mechanisms, accommodating wafers up to 8" (200 mm) in size, having a fully motorized stage with encoder, and including a scientific color CMOS-based camera. Some key features of the required microscope include: • A 100x apochromat objective with numerical aperture (NA) at least 0.9 and working distance (WD) at least 2 mm • Compatibility with brightfield, darkfield, and differential interference (DIC) contrast mechanisms • Ability to accommodate wafers up to 8" (200 mm) in size • A fully motorized stage with encoder, allowing acquisition of stitched images • A stage speed of up to 240 mm/s • A scientific color CMOS-based camera with sensor at least 35.8 mm x 23.8 mm, pixel count 6000 x 3984 or greater, and pixel size 6 um x 6 um or larger