A thin silicon oxy-nitride hard mask on the PSM blank is needed for the feature patterning with the size smaller
than 70 nm. It is a good material for hard mask. However, the electrical property of silicon oxy-nitride with the thickness
smaller than 10 nm causes the chromium surface damage during the mask processes. From the measurement of the
surface damage, we figure out that the chromium surface damage is originated from the charging and the dielectric
breakdown phenomena. In our present work, two types of silicon oxy-nitride film with the thicknesses of 5 nm and 12
nm are tested for verifying optimal mask fabrication processes. We find that the occurrence of ESD damage is related to
the thickness of silicon oxy-nitride hard mask and mask fabrication process conditions. The optimal fabrication process
condition for silicon oxy-nitride thin film hard mask, in which break-down never occurs, is discussed.
The information of the chromium top layer is important in photomask fabrication. Resist coating process and optical
transmittance change of chromium after mask cleaning process depend on the surface morphology and thickness. In this
paper, we present that ellipsometry, the nondestructive optical measurement method, is an effective and convenient
method for the inspection of chromium oxide on the quartz blank. We checked data obtained by ellipsometry for
chromium surface morphology with atomic force microscope, for surface energy with contact angle measurement, and
for optical density change with optical transmittance measurement. It turns out that ellipsometry gives successfully the
information of chromium oxide on the quartz blank.
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