Negative tone shrink materials (NSM) suitable for resolution enhancement of negative tone development (NTD) 193nm immersion resists have been developed. While this technology is being expanded to integrated circuits (IC) manufacturing, there still have two major problems to apply various processes. One of them is shrink ID bias which means shrink differences between isolated (I) and dense (D) CDs, and the other one is Y/X shrinkage bias which means shrinkage differences between major axis (Y) and minor axis (X) of the elongated or oval shape pattern. While we have presented the improvement of shrink ID bias at SPIE2014 [1], the reduction of Y/X shrinkage bias was the examination theme for quite some time. In this paper, we present Y/X shrinkage bias of current NTD shrink material, new concept material for Y/X bias reduction and the result of new shrink material. Current NTD shrink model has Y/X bias of 1.6 (Y shrink=16nm) at a mixing bake (MB) of 150°C on AZ AX2110P NTD elongated pattern of X=70nm and Y=210nm ADI. This means shrinkage of Y has larger shrinkage than X and that makes difficult to apply shrink material. We expected that the characteristic shape of elongated pattern was one of the root-cause for Y/X bias, and then simulated how to achieve equivalent shrinkage at Y and X. We concluded that available resist volume per each Y and X unit was not equivalent and need new shrink concept to solve Y/X bias. Based on our new concept, we prepared new shrink material which has lower Y/X bias and larger shrink amount compared with current NTD shrink material. Finally we have achieved lower Y/X bias from 1.6 to 1.1 at MB150°C and moreover got higher shrinkage than current NTD shrink material from 10.1nm to 16.7nm.
Negative tone shrink materials (NSM) suitable for resolution enhancement of negative tone development (NTD) 193nm immersion resists have been developed. While this technology is being applied to integrated circuits (IC) manufacturing, reduction of shrink differences between isolated and dense (ID) CDs also called as shrink ID bias is the challenge to meet wide-spread applications. In this paper, we present the effects of resist thermal flow, proximity effects of DUV exposure, flood exposure of after developed image (ADI) on the NSM shrink. High mixing bake (MB) temperature (example 170°C) during the shrink process resulted in increased resist thermal flow leading to worse shrink ID bias of 3.5 nm. As different pitch pattern has different proximity effect and matching with illumination condition, uneven dose is expected on them. These differences in dose required to obtain same through pitch (1:X, X-1, 1.5, 2, 3, 5) CD was assigned as the cause for shrink ID bias as the de-protection chemistry is related to dose which affects the shrink amount. This was further confirmed by flood exposure of after developed image (ADI) which reduced shrink ID bias from 3.5 nm to 1.8 nm. We concluded that the flood exposure makes the ADIs of the resist chemically uniform thereby minimizing shrink ID bias. Based on these studies, a mechanism for shrink ID bias is proposed. A modified NSM with 1.2 nm shrink ID bias has been developed without the need for the flood exposure.
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