Insituthin film thickness measurement is an important problem in semiconductor processing, which is currently limited by the lack of adequate sensors. Most of today’s available techniques are restricted to certain type of films and many have difficulties in performing the measurementinsitu. The fact that the velocity of an ultrasonic Lamb wave traveling in a silicon wafer is changed by the thin film coating on the wafer surface can be used as a monitoring method for basically any type of film—opaque, transparent, metal, or insulator. The acoustic sensors are easily implemented into plasma or CVD environments. We have demonstrated the technique in an aluminum sputtering system in which we measure Al film thickness with a resolution of ±100 A˚. Even better resolution can be achieved for SiO2, copper, and tungsten films. This system has a variety of potential applications, not only in film thickness measurement, but also in characterization of film properties and multilayer deposition process control. ©1995 American Institute of Physics.