Experimental phase defect printability evaluation using a programmed phase defect in EUVL mask

Tsuneo Terasawa; Tsuyoshi Amano; Sunghyun Oh; Takeshi Yamane; Hidehiro Watanabe

doi:10.1117/12.2011347

1 April 2013 Experimental phase defect printability evaluation using a programmed phase defect in EUVL mask

Tsuneo Terasawa, Tsuyoshi Amano, Sunghyun Oh, Takeshi Yamane, Hidehiro Watanabe

Proceedings Volume 8679, Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) Lithography IV; 86791B (2013) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2011347
Event: SPIE Advanced Lithography, 2013, San Jose, California, United States

Abstract

Influence of phase defects on printed images of mask pattern was experimentally investigated by printing line patterns on wafer, with the line patterns’ half pitches of 26 nm ~ 22 nm. And the experimental results were compared with the simulation results. A test mask prepared for this experiment contained programmed phase defects of 100 nm ~ 34 nm in width and of around 1.9 nm ~1.5 nm in depth. The defects were arrayed in a way such that the pitch of the array would differ from the pitches of the absorber line pitches. Therefore, the phase defects were placed at different positions relative to those of the absorber line patterns. Mask patterns were printed on wafer using an exposure tool NXE:3100 with a numerical aperture (NA) of 0.25 and a reduction of 4X. To evaluate the printed patterns affected by the phase defects, dipole illumination was employed. The incident angle of mask illumination chief ray was 6 degrees and the direction of absorber line patterns on the mask was set parallel to the chief ray incident plane. The printed line patterns on wafer were evaluated; and the phase defect impacts on them were examined in terms of space width variation as measured by SEM. An influence of line edge roughness (LER) of the resist pattern did seem to appear in this experiment, it was difficult to analyze the critical dimension (CD) error with accuracy of better than 10 %. Although there happened to be a quantitative difference between the simulation and experimental results, the relative location dependence was quite noticeable and the effect of a phase defect was mitigated by covering the defect with an absorber pattern.

Citation Download Citation

Tsuneo Terasawa, Tsuyoshi Amano, Sunghyun Oh, Takeshi Yamane, and Hidehiro Watanabe "Experimental phase defect printability evaluation using a programmed phase defect in EUVL mask", Proc. SPIE 8679, Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) Lithography IV, 86791B (1 April 2013); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2011347

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