With the continuous development of advanced semiconductor technology, the critical pattern shrinkage stably in integrated circuits has become a crucial step for product performance improvement and power consumption reduction. Compared with EUV technology, ArF immersion lithography of DUV is still the most popular research for advanced wafer fabrication, which makes the local critical dimension uniformity (LCDU) improvement become challenging for continuous pattern shrinkag. In the known research, LCDU for small hole pattern is affected by various factors, such as MEEF/OPC model/pattern density on mask and litho/Etch/Metrology process and so on. In the previous study, the improvement of wafer LCDU could be achieved by reducing MEEF of using HT PSM mask. On this basis, we also studied a new type of low sensitivity photoresist for HT PSM mask, which has better performance in controlling LER and LWR. In the meantime, compared with the actual performance of mask LCDU, it is verified that this new photoresist has obvious improvement. This paper mainly studies and compares the differences between the new low sensitivity photoresist and traditional photoresist, and conducts experiments to verify its performance on mask LCDU with extreme small hole patterns. It was found that the LCDU of the mask using new photoresist is improved by ~12%. Furthermore, in the actual application of fab production, the wafer LCDU is improved about 6~10%, and the pattern resolution and profile have also been improved to some extent, this research has played an important role in the development of advanced semiconductor processes.
Reticle defect problem caused by different reasons is an unavoidable issue for mask application in fab, which has great influence on the quality and yield of chip product. With the development of chip pitch size, defect management became increasingly important for the higher demand of defect printability. For different patterns of reticle, the impact is quite different owing to the defect location relative to patterns is different which may impact critical dimension (CD) and actual pattern distort on wafer and result in product yield loss. In this study, we used a special algorithm to combine die to die detection results with MEBES data, and defined the defects risk with the energy attenuation (energy loss) of the whole pattern region which different from traditional point-to-point comparison in KLA inspection equipment. Besides, we introduced sensitivity factor(S) for better evaluate the defect risk. The mathematical relationship between the size of the mask defect and the wafer CD are verified by experiments and based on the experimental results, we established the energy loss auto measurement system for monitoring and analysis system of the defect of the hole pattern mask by correlate the size of the defects to the light energy loss rate, which effectively reduces the process risk caused by the mask defect.
Improving local critical dimension uniformity (LCDU) is always significant for enlarging process windows and reducing defect rates in lithography, especially for more scaling sub-20nm nodes in DRAM devices. In this study, various strategies are evaluated to improve both ADI and AEI LCDU on one of multiple patterning processes, Litho-Etch-Litho-Etch (LELE) process. Firstly, different advanced photoresists and track recipe optimization methods are explored and evaluated. The best result shows ADI LCDU is improved by 10.0%, and AEI LCDU by 10.3%. Secondly, several source mask optimization (SMO) solutions are tested and ADI and AEI LCDU is improved by 5.5% and 5.7%. Thirdly, new type of photomask, 30% high transmission phase shift mask (HT PSM), is introduced to optimize NILS and MEEF performances. The result shows ADI and AEI LCDU are enhanced by 13.7% and 14.2%. Additionally, etch advanced vertical profile approach can further improve on-device AEI LCDU by 19.0%.
EUV is considered to be the promising lithography technology for the continuous evolution of semiconductor nodes. However, the mainstream ArF/Immersion lithography are still used in current industry and keep continual develop process node ahead. The performance of the mask determines the quality of lithography process directly. Litho-images on wafer come from mask pattern. The quality control of exposure image like local CD uniformity(LCDU) become the most critical factor except the optical proximity correction (OPC) effect. In view of the great challenge of LCDU improvement of small hole pattern on the of 1xnm process research and development. How to use ArF/Immersion lithography technology to improve the performance of hole pattern is this research topic. A new high transmission phase shift mask(HT-PSM) developed on the common ArF/Immersion platform and compared with the performance of normalized image log slope(NILS), mask error enhancement factor(MEEF) and depth of focus (DOF), found that 30%HT-PSM has advantage over the hole pattern. In this paper, research for positive tone development(PTD) and negative tone development(NTD) on high transmission phase shift rate. Different transmission manufacturing processes and application of 30%PSM are compared with conventional 6%PSM. At the same time, litho-image exposure on wafer can be measured and compared in actual research and development. Combine the results of resolution and physical failure analysis(PFA) results, it has higher resolution and good section-cross profile. Meanwhile, the LCDU is improved about 10% batter than conventional PSM mask, which makes an effective contribution to the research and development of advanced process.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.