GPU-accelerated white-light scanning interferometer for large-area, high-speed surface profile measurements

Abstract

A special-purpose design of white-light scanning interferometer is described here for the high-speed 3-D profile measurement of micro- and nano-patterned surfaces. Parallel processing of fringe data is accomplished by adopting a graphics processing unit (GPU), which allows a great reduction in the computational time in implementing a recursive, weighted algorithm to detect the envelop peak of low-coherence interferograms without any post-processing. Experimental result shows that the processing time of the used GPU is at least 160 times faster than that of the conventional method relying on the central processing unit (CPU) in handling interferometric fringe data of four megabytes. © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.