Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been identified by various regulatory bodies as substances of concern. In line with the objective of safer and sustainable by design, a comprehensive program has been initiated to address these concerns. Part of this program includes the development of non -fluorinated photoacid generators (PAGs) without introducing new chemicals with unintended consequences. Using computational chemistry and synthetic organic chemistry , several scaffolds amenable to PAG library design have been realized. These novel PAGs offer facile tunability and advantages in many critical design parameters such as pKa, diffusion, absorption, shelf-life stability, and scalability. These early generation non-fluorinated PAGs show competitive and similar lithographic performance compared to fluorinated PAGs in i-line, krypton fluoride (KrF) laser, argon fluoride (ArF) laser and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography.
Semiconducting device manufacture encounters more lithographic challenges in terms of feature size shrinking, killer contaminants, and balancing performance requirements for advanced node patterning. This talk will provide an overview of the key barriers and scopes for materials innovations to enable high resolution patterning, fast photospeed, low roughness and defects, while maintaining a good processing window. It will also provide a fundamental view of how nanometric uniformity and the interplay between different components in a photoresist thin film impact pattern fidelity.
The development of Chemically Amplified Resists (CARs) for Extreme Ultra-Violet Lithography (EUVL) requires unique molecular and macromolecular design considerations. The combination of photon-induced variation effect coupled with material and processing variabilities makes stochastic consequences in EUV resist significantly more severe than that in ArF resist. Among the other factors, conversion of the scarce number of absorbed EUV photons into imaging events is directly modulated by acid generation quantum yield. In this study, we measure the EUV acid generation efficiency of different Photoacid Generators (PAGs). Our results show that in addition to PAG electronic properties, other structural-driven PAG properties can have a significant impact on resist sensitivity. In a complementary part of this study, we have measured PAG acid generation efficiency under EUV exposure in newly designed polymer matrixes. Such polymers comprise high absorption EUV elements and EUV-specific sensitizers. Insights into the effect of the polymer matrix on EUV acid generation quantum yield are presented.
Linewidth roughness (LWR) remains a difficult challenge for improvement in all resist materials. In this paper, we intend to focus on the impact of key components of LWR by analyzing the Power Spectral Density (PSD) curves which can be obtained using Fractilia’s MetroLER computational software. We will study systematic changes to ArF resist formulations and correlate these changes to the overall PSD curves. In this manner, we can extract LER/LWR 3σ values as well as resist correlation length and the low/high-frequency roughness components. We will also investigate the relationship between PSD and LWR through lithographic/etch processing and demonstrate which components correspond with the largest impact. In order to achieve quality data over low and high frequency ranges we changed our standard metrology setup to capture longer lines. By making systematic changes to the ArF resists, we can determine the key impacts of various controllable resist factors on the PSD. Through systematic analysis, we can deconvolute LWR improvements both after develop and after an etch process.
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