Tag Archives: litho

EUVL Masks may need to be Tool-Specific

Extreme Ultra-Violet Lithography (EUVL) keeps hurting my brain. Just when I can understand how it could be used in profitable commercial high-volume manufacturing (HVM) I hear something that seriously strains my brain. First it was the mirrors and mask in vacuum, then it was the resist and pellicle, then it was the source power and availability, and in each case scientists and engineers did amazing work and showed a way to HVM. Now we hear that EUVL might require fabs to park work-in-progress (WIP) lots of wafers behind a single critical tool with an idealistic 80% availability on a good day, and lots of downtime bad days. Horrors!

For “5nm-node” designs the maximum allowable edge placement-error (EPE) in patterning overlay is only 2nm. While the physics of ~13.5nm wavelength EUVL means that aberration in the reflecting mirrors appears as up to 3nm variation in the fidelity of projected patterns. This variation can be measured and compensated for at the physical mask level, but then each mask would only be good for one specific exposure tool. John Sturtevant—SPIE Fellow, and director of RET product development in the Design to Silicon Division at Mentor Graphics—briefly discussed this on February 26th during Nikon LithoVision held just before SPIE Advanced Lithography.

Sturtevant explained that the Zernike coefficients for EUV are inherently almost 1 order-of-magnitude higher than for DUV at 193nm wavelength, as detailed in the SemiMD article “Edge Placement Error Control in Multi-Patterning.” How the inherent physical sources of aberration must be tightened to avoid image distortion and contrast loss as they scale with wavelength was discussed by by Fenger et al. in 2013 in the article “Extreme ultraviolet lithography resist-based aberration metrology” (doi:10.1117/1.JMM.12.4.043001).

—E.K.

Patterning with Films and Chemicals

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Somewhere around 40nm is the limit on the smallest half-pitch feature that can be formed with a single-exposure of 193-nm wavelength laser light using water immersion (193i) lithography. While multiple-patterning (MP) is needed to achieve tighter half-pitches, smaller features at the same pitch can be formed using technology extensions of 193i. “Chemistry is key player in lithography process,” is the title of a short video presentation by Dow Electronic Materials corporate fellow Peter Trefonas now hosted on the SPIE website (DOI: 10.1117/2.201608.02).

Trefonas as been working on chemistries for lithography for decades, including photoresists, antireflectant coatings, underlayers, developers, ancillary products, and environmentally safer green products. He is an inventor on 61 US patents, has over 25 additional published active U.S. patent applications, is an author of 99 journal and technical publications, and is a recipient of the 2014 ACS Heroes of Chemistry Award and the 2013 SPIE C. Grant Willson Best Paper Award in Patterning Materials and Processes. Now a Senior Member of SPIE, he earned his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry with Prof. Robert West at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985.

Trefonas explains how traditional Chemically-Amplified (CA) resists are engineered with Photo-Acid Generators (PAG) to balance the properties for advanced lithography. However, in recent years the ~40-nm half-pitch resolution limit has been extended with chemistries to shrink contact holes, smooth line-width roughness, and to do frequency-multiplication using Directed Self-Assembly (DSA). All of these resolution extension technologies rely upon chemistry to create the final desired pattern fidelity.

—E.K.

SAQP Specs for 7nm finFETs

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As discussed in my last Ed’s Threads, lithography has become patterning as evidenced by first use of Self-Aligned Quadruple Patterning (SAQP) in High Volume Manufacturing (HVM) of memory chips. Meanwhile, industry R&D hub imec has been investigating use of SAQP for “7nm” and “5nm” node finFET HVM, as reported as SPIE-AL this year in Paper 9782-12.
The specifications for pitches ranging from 18 to 24 nanometers are as follow:

7.0nm Critical Dimension (CD) after etch,
0.5nm (3sigma) CD uniformity (CDU), and
<1nm Line-Width and Line-End Roughness (LWR and LER) assuming 10% of CD.

“Pitch walk”—variation in final pitch after multi-patterning—results in different line widths, and can result in subsequent excessive etch variation due to non-uniform loading effects. To keep the pitch walk in SAQP at acceptable levels for the 7nm node, the core-1 CDU has to be 0.5nm 3sigma and 0.8nm range after both litho and etch. In other presentations at SPIE-AL this year, the best LER after litho was ~4nm, improving to ~2nm after PEALD smoothing of sidewalls, but still double the desired spec.

The team at imec developed a SAQP flow using amorphous-Carbon (aC) and amorphous-Silicon (aSi) as the cores, and low-temperature Plasma-Enhanced Atomic-Layer Deposition (PEALD) of SiO2 for both sets of spacers. Bilayer DARC (SiOC) and BARC were used for reflectivity control. Compared to SAQP schemes where the mandrels are only aSi, imec claims that this approach saves 20% in cost due to the use of aC core and the elimination of etch-stopping-layers.

—E.K.

Litho becomes Patterning

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Once upon a time, lithographic (litho) processes were all that IC fabs needed to transfer the design-intent into silicon chips. Over the last 10-15 years, however, IC device structural features have continued to shrink below half the wavelength of the laser light used in litho tools, such that additional process steps are needed to form the desired features. Self-Aligned Double Patterning (SADP) schemes use precise coatings deposited as “spacers” on the sidewalls of mandrels made from developed photoresist or a sacrificial material at a given pitch, such that after selective mandrel etching the spacers pitch-split. SADP has been used in HVM IC fabs for many years now. Self-Aligned Quadruple Pattering (SAQP) has reportedly been deployed in a memory IC fab, too.

An excellent overview of the patterning complexities of SAQP was provided by Sophie Thibaut of TEL in a presentation at SPIE-AL on “SAQP integration using spacer on spacer pitch splitting at the resist level for sub-32nm pitch applications.” Use of a spacer-on-spacer process flow—enabled by clever combinations of SiO2 and TiO2 spacers deposited by Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD)—requires the following unit-process steps:
1 193i litho,
2 ALD spacers,
2 wet etches, and
4 plasma etches.

Since non-litho processes dominate the transfer of design-intent to silicon, from first principles we should consider such integrated flows as “patterning.” Etch selectivity to remove one material while leaving another, and deposition dependent on underlying materials determine much of the pattern fidelity. Such process flows are new to IC fabs, but have been used for decades in the manufacturing of Micro-Electrical Mechanical Systems (MEMS), though generally on a patterning length scale of microns instead of the nanometers needed for advanced ICs. R&D labs today are even experimenting with Self-Aligned Octuple Patterning (SAOP), and based on the legacy of MEMS processing it certainly could be done.

—E.K.

ASML Books Production EUV Orders

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TSMC commits to two tools for delivery next year

Maybe, just maybe, ASML Holding N.V. (ASML) has made the near-impossible a reality by creating a cost-effective Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV @ ~13.5nm wavelength) all-reflective lithographic tool. The company has announced that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd. (TSMC) has ordered two NXE:3350B EUV systems for delivery in 2015 with the intention to use those systems in production. In addition, two NXE:3300B systems already delivered to TSMC will be upgraded to NXE:3350B performance. While costs and throughputs are conspicuously not-mentioned, this is still an important step for the industry.
Perhaps acquiring Cymer to get the source-technology in-house for tighter integration was important. Perhaps evolutionary improvements crept along by tough engineering rigor. Perhaps the industry got lucky. One way or the other, ASML has had the goal of delivering not just hardware but functional uptime/availability using very complex EUV technology, and now it seems to be on the cusp of making it happen. The company claims that current EUV tools are available 50% of the time, at unspecified source power levels.
At its Investor Day in London today, ASML outlined its expected opportunity to grow net sales to about EUR 10 billion and to triple earnings per share by 2020, an indication of the confidence the company has in its technology and employees. Much of the growth will be in Deep-UV immersion tools, and in so-called “Holistic Lithography” products to deliver advanced correction capabilities. An example of Holistic Litho is Source-Mask-Optimization (SMO) that can be used for triple-patterning of a 48nm minimum pitch metal layer using DUV immersion in a Litho-Etch-Litho-Etch-Litho-Etch (LELELE) flow, such that the Depth-of-Focus (DoF) can be increased from 70 to 86nm. Holistic EUV means that SMO can reduce the dose required to get 120nm DoF from 46 to 20 mJ/cm2 for a 45nm minimum pitch metal layer.
The presentations can be found at the company’s website.
— E. K.