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A novel, anamorphic lens design, has been developed to provide the required Numerical Aperture; this lens will be paired with new, faster stages and more accurate sensors enabling Moore’s law economical requirements, as well as the tight focus and overlay control needed for future process nodes.
The tighter focus and overlay control budgets, as well as the anamorphic optics, will drive innovations in the imaging and OPC modelling, and possibly in the metrology concepts.
Furthermore, advances in resist and mask technology will be required to image lithography features with less than 10nm resolution.
This paper presents an overview of the key technology innovations and infrastructure requirements for the next generation EUV systems.
We have found that besides a Ta absorber thickness reduction an illumination pupil optimization is necessary to fully remove these CD asymmetries. The pupil optimization is achieved by relating the aerial image decomposition (here: symmetrization and balancing of intensities across the diffracted orders) with lithographic metrics per pupil plane location. The resulting pupil allows us (i) to lift the focus-dependent CD asymmetries and (ii) to co-optimize a number of lithographic metrics such as overlapping process window, contrast, non-telecentricity and pattern shift. The importance of subsidiary conditions (e.g. symmetry of the pupil, required DOF) will be discussed.
In the first part this complementary approach is applied to find an optimum thickness of a typical Ta-based absorber for imaging horizontal spaces through pitch. And although an absorber thickness of around 70 nm is found to be preferable for this particular application, the thickness choice leads to conflicting results for the general printability of 10 nm technology node features. Hence we show that a moderate reduction of the absorber thickness can be allowed when the mask bias of these features is optimized appropriately. The moderate thickness reduction already allows for the mitigation of some of the conflicting imaging aspects.
In the second part we expand the workflow by analyzing phase aberrations in n & k material space. This phase-based optical property screening shows that an alternative absorber based on materials such as Ni with k higher than Ta show superior best focus and contrast metrics. These alternative absorber embodiments would allow the overall reduction of M3D effects and adverse application dependencies of current Ta-based absorbers due to a combination of thickness reduction and enhancement of absorption.
Towards 22 nm: fast and effective intra-field monitoring and optimization of process windows and CDU
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