The resolution limit is one of the key performance specifications of photolithography machine. And off axis illumination is one of the important resolution enhanced technologies. The generally used illumination modes include conventional, annular, quadrupole and dipole. And their performance is expressed by the characteristic parameters. To guarantee these parameters, the pupil correction unit should be adopted. Therefore, it is necessary to study the pupil correction technology for photolithography. In order to achieve flexible pupil correction, a method with correction finger is studied, which could change the regional energy by partial blocking effect. It is available to reduce regional energy by adjusting the width and length of correction finger. As a contrast, a method with grayscale filter is also analyzed. The grayscale filter has uniform transmission distribution in every region. The higher energy region corresponds to lower transmission distribution to achieve the energy balance. The comparison of the two pupil correction methods are analyzed firstly. The analysis results show that the two methods could improve pupil performance significantly and achieve the same correction results. Furthermore, the photolithography performance simulation is implemented. The results indicate that the critical dimension (CD) and H-V bias of the corrected pupils are improved consistently compared with the uncorrected pupils. In the application perspective, the method with correction finger is more flexible because its length could be adjusted to change relative blocked energy. However, the grayscale filter has to be replaced to change its correction effect.
In the 28nm and below nodes lithography machine, the freeform pupil illumination has been widely used with the application of source mask optimization technology. As one of the most important implementations, the freeform illumination module is equipped with micro-mirror array (MMA), which can generate arbitrary pupil by adjusting its angle position. It is necessary to monitor the angle position of MMA real time for its significant function. However, there are several difficulties in the monitoring: 1) The monitoring unit could not disturb the working light path. This determines that the monitoring light should be glancing incident onto the micro-mirror; 2) The size of micro-mirror is relative small. And its rotation angle range is relative large in two dimensions; 3) There are several thousands of micro-mirrors. The crosstalk should be avoided in the monitoring method. In order to find a suitable monitoring method, the imaging and Fourier transform methods are studied. In the imaging method, the reticle is imaged onto the detector with the reflection of a single micro-mirror. The center of the reticle image is calculated to represent the angle position. In the Fourier transform method, the angular distribution of the light reflected by the micro-mirror is detected. And the angular distribution centroid is used to evaluate the angle position. In order to verify the feasibility and compare the performance of the two methods, the influences of alignment error and the scattered light are analyzed. The simulation results show that the Fourier transform method is insensitive to the scattered light and is independent to the relative position of the micro-mirror and Fourier transform lens.
With the application of source mask optimization (SMO) technology in the 28nm and below nodes photolithography machine, the freeform pupil illumination technology has been widely utilized to achieve resolution enhancement for various complex patterns. The freeform illumination module (FIM) equipped with micro-mirror array (MMA) are proposed, which could realize arbitrary pupil by adjusting the angle position distribution of MMA. Therefore, it is necessary to research the freeform pupil illumination technology in immersion photolithography machine. An excellent performance optical system for FIM mainly including homogenization unit, micro-lens array (MLA), MMA and Fourier transform lens is proposed in this paper. The homogenization unit is used to increase the uniformity of the beam incident onto MMA. The beam incident onto MLA is divided and focused on MMA. The focused sub-beams are reflected by micro-mirrors and then incident into Fourier transform lens. And the freeform pupil is generated at its back focal plane. In order to verify the feasibility of the designed optical system, three freeform pupils optimized by SMO are input into the designed FIM and the corresponding simulated pupils are exported. Furthermore, the photolithography performance simulations of the optimized and simulated pupils are implemented in optical model. The results indicate that their critical dimension (CD) differences are less than 0.5nm RMS for thousands of patterns in 40nm-80nm, such as line end, line space, contact hole, end to line, SRAM et. al., which shows that the excellent performance of the designed FIM.
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