Plasma etch patterning of EUV lithography: balancing roughness and selectivity trade off

Rastogi, Vinayak; Beique, Genevieve; Sun, Lei; Cottle, Hongyun; Feurprier, Yannick; Metz, Andrew; Kumar, Kaushik; Labelle, Cathy; Arnold, John; Colburn, Matthew; Ranjan, Alok

doi:10.1117/12.2216840

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…3 It is believed that during CF4 etching, fluorine replaces hydrogen or substitutes other groups to form a protective film on the organic (resist) surface. 3,6 It is important to note that XPS results confirm that Resist-3 contains the highest iodine content, followed by Resist-2 and Resist-1 at 0 sec etching time (Figure 7-D). At longer CF4 etching time, iodine % appeared to behave differently for each resist.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 84%

Understanding etch properties of advanced chemically amplified EUV resist

Park

Aqad

Cen³

et al. 2023

Advanced Etch Technology and Process Integration for Nanopatterning XII

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology empowers integrated circuit industry to mass produce chips with smaller pitches and higher density. Along with EUV tool advancement, significant progress has also been made in the development and advancement of EUV chemically amplified resist (CAR) materials, which allows for the improvement of resolution, line edge roughness, and sensitivity (RLS) trade-off. The scarce number of EUV photons has triggered the development of resist material with high absorption at 13.5 nm. However, a review of open literature reveals very limited reports on the effect of high EUV absorption elements on etch properties of advanced EUV resist. To ensure Moore’s Law continues to move forward, further resist performance improvement is required. In this regard, stochastic defects originating from photon shot noise, materials, and processing variabilities present a unique challenge for the extension of CAR platform for the patterning of smaller nodes. Notably, less attention has been paid to defects formed during the etching process used for pattern transfer. In this paper, we report on the relationship between resist make-up and etch properties. In particular, the effect of incorporation of EUV high absorbing elements are examined. New resist material design strategies for continuous improvement of EUV CAR lithographic performance will be discussed.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 84%

Understanding etch properties of advanced chemically amplified EUV resist

Park

Aqad

Cen³

et al. 2023

Advanced Etch Technology and Process Integration for Nanopatterning XII

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The impact of varying those process conditions on the metrics of profiles is usually non-linear, which is mainly due to the non-linear properties of both the plasmas and the surface reactions and kinetics. [1,2] To deal with those coupling and non-linearity, the iterative and manual design-of-experiment (DOE) approach is commonly used in fabs, which is costly and timeconsuming especially as the time of a single process becomes much longer.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Process optimization for shallow trench isolation etch using computational models

Huang¹,

Panneerchelvam²,

Huard³

et al. 2023

Advanced Etch Technology and Process Integration for Nanopatterning XII

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In today’s advanced semiconductor process manufacturing, critical dimensions of device features have decreased to a few nanometers while the aspect ratios have increased beyond 100. The cost of process development has significantly increased and the performance of the lithography and plasma etch patterning processes are critical to the success of ramping a new technology node toward profitable high-volume manufacturing. In this paper, a three-dimensional Monte Carlo-based feature scale model, ProETCH®, has been developed for modeling etch process with the capability of optimizing the process by solving forward and inverse problems. The shallow trench isolation etch process in self-aligned double patterning was investigated. The mechanism of silicon etch by Ar/Cl2 plasma was developed with experimental data as a reference. The developed model captures the trends and has quantitative accuracy in comparison to the experimental data, and can be used to identify the different fundamental pathways which contribute to the profile metrics. The developed model was then used to solve the forward problem, which is to predict profiles at different process conditions, and the inverse problem, which is to search for the process conditions (e.g, power and pressure) which could result in desirable profiles.

show abstract

“…In our work, 2 we used extreme UV (EUV)-lithography-based patterning to investigate the impact of key plasma parameters on the transfer fidelity of sub-40nm patterns. EUV resist masks are very thin and thus require high etch-rate selectivity to bring about transfer onto the layer beneath.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%