Overview of materials and processes for lithography

High Sensitivity Resists for EUV Lithography: A Review of Material Design Strategies and Performance Results

“…Only few groups worldwide were active in the resist field and often the efforts were diverted in different directions. On the other hand a significant research direction for lithographic materials followed by many polymer groups was toward self-assembled block copolymers for directed self-assembling (DSA) lithography [1][2][3][4]. The momentum seems to have changed during the last five years after the choice of EUV as the next industrial technology became clear in the lithography community along with the now well-recognized demand for high sensitivity EUV resists.…”

(TMT)n clusters as dilute debris‐free tin source for generation of multiply charged tin ions of relevance in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, under intense laser irradiation

“…In the fabrication procedure, the process of lithography is generally used to craft circuit features over a silicon substrate during the manufacture of microelectronic devices. Along with other factors, advances in lithography are critical for further scaling down the size of microelectronic devices . At present for high‐volume manufacturers, deep UV (DUV) is the workhorse of photolithography for the fabrication of microelectronic semiconductor devices, typically using the 193 nm wavelength obtained from an ArF excimer laser as the photolithography source .…”

What We Don’t Know About EUV Exposure Mechanisms

“…The chemical mechanisms that occur in chemically amplified resists during exposure to 193-or 248-nm light are well understood [7,8]. For example, either the photon is absorbed by a PhotoAcid Generator (PAG) creating an excited state in the PAG.…”

“…Researchers [2,3,6,8,10,[14][15][16][17][18][19] have proposed that the dominant chemical mechanisms involved in EUV chemically amplified resists include: (1) electron trapping (or dissociative electron attachment), (2) hole-initiated chemistry, or (3) internal excitation (or dissociative electron excitation), as described below ( Figure 6). In electron trapping, a low energy electron (perhaps 0-5 eV [17]) may be trapped by a PAG molecule, occupying an antibonding orbital in the PAG.…”