10 October 2019 Overlay error investigation for metal containing resist
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Abstract

Metal containing resists (MCR) are one of the candidates for extreme ultraviolet resists aiming to achieve the resolution, linewidth roughness, and sensitivity requirements of advanced design nodes. MCRs intrinsically have high etch resistance owing to their metal content. Therefore, low resist thickness (∼18  nm) is sufficient to transfer resist patterns into an underlying hard mask. Also, the thin resist reduces susceptibility to pattern collapse during development because of low aspect ratio. However, thus far, little attention has been paid to optical metrology and inspectability (overlay, defect inspection, scatterometry, etc.) of these resists, which is another critical requirement to move MCR toward high-volume manufacturing. We investigate the overlay metrology and overlay correction with MCR. Even though the optical contrast for MCR is slightly lower than for chemically amplified resist (CAR), it seemed sufficient for high-quality overlay metrology. However, the measurement precision for MCR is deteriorated compared to that for CAR, resulting in significantly higher residuals. The root cause of the deteriorated measurement precision was found in grains in the optical image after MCR development. Interestingly, the after etch performance of CAR and MCR is identical. We demonstrate that with sufficient sampling, appropriate correctables can be extracted from the MCR overlay results. Finally, we discuss how the increased image noise can be compensated by the applied sampling scheme.

© 2019 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) 1932-5150/2019/$28.00 © 2019 SPIE
Roel Gronheid, Satomi Higashibata, Onur Demirer, Yusuke Tanaka, Dieter Van den Heuvel, Ming Mao, Masaru Suzuki, Satoshi Nagai, Waikin Li, and Philippe Leray "Overlay error investigation for metal containing resist," Journal of Micro/Nanolithography, MEMS, and MOEMS 18(4), 044001 (10 October 2019). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JMM.18.4.044001
Received: 30 June 2019; Accepted: 20 September 2019; Published: 10 October 2019
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Cited by 1 scholarly publication.
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KEYWORDS
Overlay metrology

Semiconducting wafers

Metals

Etching

Scanners

Optical filters

Data modeling

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