Advanced RELACS Technology for ArF Resist

Parallelizable Simulation of Material Effects of Chemical Shrink Process of Nanolithography

“…This is because the shrinkage is caused by the crosslinking reaction between the water-soluble polymers and the cross-linkers catalyzed by the residual photoacids diffusing from the resist film to the chemical shrink film; hence, to the first order, the shrinkage is proportional to photoacid diffusion length, which is independent of the initial feature size. 8) It is shown in Fig. 4 that, within statistical error, the simulation matches the experiment at the baking temperatures over 105 C and for all baking times.…”

“…5) The performance of various RELACS materials has recently been investigated for sub-100 nm technology nodes. 8,9) Hence, theoretical studies on the dependence of the chemical shrink process on the materials properties of CA resist and RELACS are important, not only for the fundamental understanding of the reaction-diffusion phenomena at the resist-RELACS interface, but also for the application to material system design and processing technology integration. 10) In this study, a two-dimensional chemical shrink process simulator was developed to study the reaction-diffusion phenomena at the interface of the CA resist and the RELACS.…”

The resolution enhancement lithography assisted by chemical shrink based on KrF lithography technology

“…However, ArF excimer laser lithography relies on expensive equipment, and X-ray lithography is not yet commercially available. Additionally, electron beam (EB) direct writing technique is not cost effective because of its low throughput, although EB direct writing technique is currently available [4] . RELACS technology gets rid of the dependence on ArF lithography equipment at 0.18-0.1 µm process nodes, and continuously reduces the linewidth size of the pattern on the wafer through the chemical reaction between the shrink materials and the photoresists (Figure 1a).…”