The evolution of the ALTA(R) series of laser mask pattern generators has increased the relative contribution of intensity errors on critical-dimension (CD) control to those from placement errors. This paradigm shift has driven a change in rasterization strategy wherein aerial image sharpness is improved at the cost of a slight decrease in the averaging of column-to-column placement errors. Print performance evaluation using small-area CD test patterns show improvements in stripe-axis local CD uniformity (CDU) 3σ values of 15-25% using the new strategy, and systematic brush-error contributions were reduced by 50%.
The increased importance of intensity errors, coupled with the improvement of ALTA system performance, has also made the mask-blank and process-induced errors a more significant part of the overall error budget. A simple model based on two components, a pattern-invariant footprint and one related to the exposure density ρ(x, y), is shown to describe adequately the errors induced by these sources. The first component is modeled by a fourth-order, two-dimensional polynomial, whereas the second is modeled as a convolution of ρ(x, y) with one or more Gaussian kernels. Implementation of this model on the ALTA 4700 system shows improvements in global CDU of 50%.
The ALTA 4700 incorporates new optical subsystems to improve pattern quality performance and has added the capability to do variable multipass printing. The optical system changes are the addition of a 0.9-NA reduction lens and a new AOD subsystem to reduce beam placement and intensity errors. Variable multipass printing allows two-, four- or eight-pass printing, thereby enabling the user to optimize the pattern quality/throughput tradeoff. Local CDU 3σ performance for one pattern is reduced from 8.2 to 5.1 to 3.4 nm as the number of passes is increased from two to four to eight. Reduction of CDU performance is more pattern dependent going from four to eight passes than going from two to four passes. Pattern write times scale roughly linearly with the number of passes. Local pattern loading effects can limit global CDU performance. These effects can be reduced by optimizing resist selection and develop processes.
The ALTA 4300 system has been used to successfully write many advanced designs previously only possible with 50kV VSB systems. In order to further enlarge the application space of this high productivity system, an aerial image enhancement technique has been developed to deliver mask patterns that more closely match the pattern data for corners and jogs. This image enhancement is done in real time in the ALTA system's rasterizer by modifying the gray level mapping of pixels near the corner vertexes. SEM measurements of corner rounding with standard rasterization and the enhanced rasterization show a 35% improvement of corner rounding radius from ~205 to ~132 nm. A direct comparison of SEM micrographs show little qualitative difference between vector scan mask features and those written with aerial image enhancement. This convincingly demonstrates that the ALTA 4300 system with the new image enhancement can write many layers requiring vector scan corner acuity.
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