EUV Infrastructure: EUV photomask backside cleaning
Applied Materials as first author: Bruce J. Fender, Dusty Leonhard, Hugo Breuer, Jack Stoof
ASML: My Phung Van, Rudy Pellens, Reinout Dekkers, Jan Pieter Kuijten
Due to electrostatic chucking of the backside of EUV masks, backside cleanliness in EUV lithography is an important factor. Contamination on the backside can cause damage to reticle (e-chuck), cross-contaminate to the scanner or cause local distortions in the reticle. Cleaning of the masks offers a solution to reduce the defectivity level on reticles. However, repeated cleaning on masks is known to have an impact on absorber, CD and reflectivity. Ideally, cleaning should occur without any alterations to the critical features on the front side of the mask. With the introduction of pellicles for EUV, there could be an additional drive for backside-only cleaning.
In this work the GuardianTM Technology is introduced that enables backside cleaning without any cleaning impact on the reticle front side through a protective seal at the outer edge of the mask. The seal protects the front side during the backside clean. The cleaning process encompasses a single-sided pre-clean oxygen plasma treatment of the mask surface, followed by sonic cleaning, and ending with a rinse and dry step. Separating the mask backside from front side enables:
• Backside cleaning without any cleaning impact on features on the mask front side.
• The isolation allows an aggressive cleaning of the backside to ensure defect removal.
• Processing of reticle with studs on the front side. This prevents unnecessary actions of stud removal and removal of the remaining glue after stud removal and subsequent gluing of the studs after cleaning.
Just before chucking of a reticle, the defectivity level on the mask is initially inspected with an in-scanner reticle backside inspection tool. The GuardianTM cleaning process is able to remove the vast majority of the cleanable defects that could impact scanner performance. Post GuardianTM clean interferometric microscope defect review reveals the remaining defects > 25-μm-PSL are ~78% are indent/damage and 11% are defects with insignificant height to impact scanner performance or cleanliness.
EUV sources emit a broad band DUV Out-of-Band (OOB) light, in particular, in the wavelength range 100-400 nm. This can cause additional exposure of EUV resists made that are based on a ArF/KrF resist platform. This DUV light is partially suppressed while travelling through the optical path but a non-negligible part of it reaches wafer level and impacts imaging.
This is important for imaging at the edges of an image field when fields are printed very close to each other on the wafer (so-called butted fields, with zero field to field spacing). DUV light is reflected from the reticle black border (BB) into a neighboring exposure field on the wafer. This results in a CD change at the edges and in the corners of the fields and therefore has an impact on CD uniformity. Experimental CDU results are shown for 16 nm dense lines (DL) and 20 nm isolated spaces (IS) (N7 logic design features) in the fields exposed at 0 mm and 0.5mm distance on the wafer. Areas close to the edge of the image field are important for customer applications as they often contain qualification and monitoring structures; in addition, limited imaging capabilities in this area may result in loss of usable wafer space.
In order to understand and control OOB DUV light, it must be measured in the scanner. DUV measurements are performed in resist using a special OOB reticle coated with Aluminum (Al) having low EUV reflectance and high DUV reflectance. A model for DUV light impact on the imaging is proposed and verified. For this, DUV reflectance data is collected in the wavelengths range 100-400 nm for Al and BB and the ratio of reflectances of these materials is determined for assumed scanner and resist OOB spectra. Also direct BB OOB test is performed on the wafer and compared to Al OOB results. The sensitivity of 16 nm DL and 20 nm IS to OOB light is experimentally determined by means of double exposure test: a wafer with exposed imaging structures undergoes a second flood exposure from a DUV reflective material (Al or BB).
Finally, several OOB mitigation strategies are discussed, in particular, suppression of DUV light in the scanner (~3x improvement), recent successes of DUV suppression for 16 nm imaging resist (~1.8x improvement) and DUV reflectance mitigation in the reticle black border (~3.8x). An overview of OOB test results for multiple NXE systems will be shown including systems with new NXE:3350 optics with improved OOB suppression.
Fabrication processes of microdevices and integrated microsystems are indispensable for the development of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS). Reduction lithography becomes an important step in many new applications requiring ultra thick photolayers, large Critical Dimensions (CD) and tight control limits. For this market segment, the ASML SA 5200 reduction step-and-repeat system is a cost-effective tool for the manufacture of advanced microelectronics, MEMS, and Integrated Circuits (ICs). Along with this trend, manufacturing and development engineers, in order to better predict process interactions and better estimate process manufacturing, increasingly utilize modeling and numerical simulations.
This paper discusses the simulated and experimental lithographic performance of an i-line step-and-repeat system by using photosensitive DurimidesTM a photopolymer developed and commercialized by Arch Chemicals. These photopolymers are negative acting self-priming Polyimide precursors with a high photosensitivity, which provide thick layer exposure solutions with a wide process window. The excellent adhesion of DurimideTM films makes these materials suitable for MEMS, buffer-coat, and packaging applications. The range of film thicknesses used is from 6 μm up to 80 μm. Process windows for the different thicknesses are investigated and discussed in terms of Exposure Latitude (EL), Depth Of Focus (DOF), and Size linearity.
The lithography simulator PROLITH/2 with thick resist option has been used for all modeling activities in this work. Also, an extensive comparison is made between simulated and experimental data.
The spatial coherence of optical gratings fabricated by means of a step & repeat camera is characterized by a diffractive interferometric displacement sensor using the grating under test as the grating scale. The displacement sensor head comprises two readout gratings at a definite distance from each other which allows the determination of the local deviation of the grating period with a resolution of 0.001 nanometer.
The aberration monitor allows independent determination of spherical, coma, astigmatism and three point in a single experiment using existing equipment. The monitor consists of a circular phase object, with a diameter of approximately (lambda) /NA and a phase depth of (lambda) /2. Due to the relative large diameter, the image prints as a narrow ring into the resist. Without aberrations its contours are concentric circles. Aberrations deform the ring in a characteristic way. A detailed analysis of the ring shape through focus identifies the aberrations of the projection lens. A linear aberration model is compared with simulations. Experimental results of various aberrations are shown and ar correlated to line width measurements and interferometric lens data.
The effects of resist spinning, aluminum sputtering and chemical mechanical polishing on the observed alignment position in ASML wafer steppers are presented. Vector maps of the process induced alignment shifts are shown for various processing conditions. The deposition experiments are compared with simulations and a specially designed alignment system modeling program.
The standard ASML alignment system in combination with modified marks is used to determine the primary imaging parameters of the stepper: focus and exposure dose. The method uses a standard chromium on glass reticle. The paper discusses system calibration and feedforward process control in production. A lens qualification at the specified resolution and swing curves are shown. The exposure dose measurements are compared with dose to clear measurements. The theory for optimizing the mark layout is presented.
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