Aerial image contrast using interferometric lithography: effect on line-edge roughness

Sanchez, Martha I.; Hinsberg, William D.; Houle, Frances A.; Hoffnagle, John A.; Itô, Hiroshi; Nguyen, Cattien V.

doi:10.1117/12.350198

Cited by 51 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 1 publication

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Due to the large amount of data needed for strong statistical conclusions, only one photoresist is examined. As Sanchez et al have shown, each photoresist acts differently to contrast variations (8). However, UVII-HS is an adequate choice since it has many attributes in common with other DUV photoresists.…”

Section: Experimental Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Effect of background exposure dose upon line-edge roughness (LER)

Williamson

Neureuther

2004

SPIE Proceedings

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

LER is found to correlate strongest with the background, or flare, portion of the lithographic aerial image contrast, when compared with the image slope and "standard" (max -min)/(max + min) contrast. A large pool of collected data and rigorous statistical analysis of variance conclude with far greater than 99% confidence that as any of these measures of aerial image profile degrade, LER increases. However, the relation between background exposure and LER is by far the most significant.

show abstract

Section: Experimental Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Effect of background exposure dose upon line-edge roughness (LER)

Williamson

Neureuther

2004

SPIE Proceedings

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A detailed analysis of the effect of aerial image contrast was performed in which the image slope at the feature edge was varied and the resulting change in LER of several resists was determined. 2 It was noted that LER increased as the AIC decreased. But perhaps more importantly, it was determined that different resists have unique responses to changes in AIC, suggesting that the resist material's composition plays a major role in contributing to LER.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Resist deconstruction as a probe for innate material roughness

Fedynyshyn

2006

J. Micro/Nanolith. MEMS MOEMS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We developed an atomic force microscopy ͑AFM͒-based technique to measure intrinsic material roughness after base development. This method involves performing an interrupted development of the resist film and measuring the resulting film roughness after a certain fixed film loss. Employing this technique, we have deconstructed the resist into component materials and established that the photoacid generator ͑PAG͒ is a major material contributor of film roughness and that PAG segregation in the resist is likely responsible for nanoscale dissolution inhomogeneities. Small differences in PAG concentration as a result of standing waves in the resist can lead to large changes in surface roughness due to PAG or PAG-photoproduct segregation and the resultant nonlinear change in nanoscale dissolution rates. The temperature dependence of the PAG segregation suggests that increased mobility of the PAG that occurs may be due to a lowering of the film T g during the deprotection process.

show abstract

“…It can originate from a myriad of factors such as the photon or chemical shot noise, molecular stacking, development process, and low image contrast [1,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. Recently, mask roughness gained significant attention as one of the contributors to the wafer LER [2-9, 22, 23].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mitigating mask roughness via pupil filtering

et al. 2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The roughness present on the sidewalls of lithographically defined patterns imposes a very important challenge for advanced technology nodes. It can originate from the aerial image or the photoresist chemistry/processing [1]. The latter remains to be the dominant group in ArF and KrF lithography; however, the roughness originating from the mask transferred to the aerial image is gaining more attention [2-9], especially for the imaging conditions with large mask error enhancement factor (MEEF) values. The mask roughness contribution is usually in the low frequency range, which is particularly detrimental to the device performance by causing variations in electrical device parameters on the same chip [10][11][12]. This paper explains characteristic differences between pupil plane filtering in amplitude and in phase for the purpose of mitigating mask roughness transfer under interference-like lithography imaging conditions, where onedirectional periodic features are to be printed by partially coherent sources. A white noise edge roughness was used to perturbate the mask features for validating the mitigation.

show abstract

Aerial image contrast using interferometric lithography: effect on line-edge roughness

Cited by 51 publications

References 1 publication

Effect of background exposure dose upon line-edge roughness (LER)

Effect of background exposure dose upon line-edge roughness (LER)

Resist deconstruction as a probe for innate material roughness

Mitigating mask roughness via pupil filtering

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About