EUV lithography: progress, challenges, and outlook

Abstract

Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUVL) has been in the making for more than a quarter century. The first EUVL production tools have been delivered over the past year and chip manufacturers and suppliers are maturing the technology in pilot line mode to prepare for high volume manufacturing (HVM). While excellent progress has been made in many technical and business areas to prepare EUVL for HVM introduction, there are still critical technical and business challenges to be addressed before the industry will be able to use EUVL in HVM.

Coarse-Grained Modeling of EUV Patterning Process Reflecting Photochemical Reactions and Chain Conformations

“…To avoid these problems, extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) has been anticipated as an alternative patterning system capable of producing even finer features than DUVL with a single patterning process cycle using a 13.5 nm wavelength light source. Efforts for the cost-efficient high-volume manufacturing (HVM) of EUVL have focused on critical challenges of EUV optical source power, improvements in defects in both the mask, and resists and the trade-off relationship between resolution, line edge roughness (LER), and sensitivity (RLS trade-off) [4][5][6][7][8][9][10].…”

Low-energy electron interaction with 2-(trifluoromethyl)acrylic acid, a potential component for EUVL resist material

“…[1][2][3][4][5] The motivation is mainly the demand for higher transistor density, and by moving from the traditional 193 nm deep ultraviolet lithography (DUVL) to the 13.5 nm EUVL, significant improvement in resolution may be achieved. [6][7][8][9] However, producing and handling light of this short wavelength is technically very challenging and the instrumentation associated with the EUVL manufacturing tools is very demanding and complex. 10 Furthermore, limitations in resolution are also difficult to overcome without replacing the current photoresists with such that are optimized to perform at this short wavelength.…”

Influence of deposition rate on interface width of Mo/Si multilayers

“…So the industry has been working on extending resolution by decreasing the exposure wavelength. Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography at the wavelength of 13.5 nm is regarded as the most promoting technology [2,3]. High quality EUV reflective optics that consists of Mo/Si multilayers are required in EUV lithography system (Fig.…”