Pattern collapse and photoresist scumming reduce lithographic quality with detrimental consequence on the process window, etching and pattern transfer. As extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography patterning moves to smaller and smaller technology nodes, these phenomena become increasingly dominant. In this work, we propose a three-interface model that accounts for the collapse and wiggling during development (due to developer infiltration) and rinse and drying (due to capillary force). We introduce a metric W3 (dependant on photoresist thickness, pitch, CD, and linewidth roughness) and demonstrate experimentally that W3 of exposed materials predicts scumming while the W3 of unexposed materials predicts collapse and wiggling.
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