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With the delivery of ful field ArF steppers and scanners to the leading edge IC manufacturers in 1999 for process development work, the industry is poised to implement ArF lithography in volume production in a few years from now. The introduction of ArF lithography in large volume deice manufacturing will be at the 130-nm technology node, with a k1-factor of roughly 0.4. This will represent the first time in the history of the semiconductor industry when the critical feature size of first generation devices for a given technology node is significantly smaller than the lithographic wavelength used in the patterning. Accordingly, there are a number of integration issues that must be resolved to ensure the successful implement of this technology. Such issues include antireflection coatings issues like reflectivity control and thickness, and the tradeoffs between using organic and inorganic ARCs; resist material issues like optical absorption, feature profile, CD uniformity and line edge roughness; and etch issues like resist loss, line edge roughening, endcap pullback, etc. For instance, one of the major problems with most currently available 193-nm resists is their high optical absorption at the exposure wavelength. This necessitates the use of significantly thinner 193-nm resist films than have been the case in earlier lithographic regimes, but etch considerations preclude this option as these materials do not have bey good etch stability. A balance between absorption and etch requirements must therefore be struck to ensure the successful implementation of this lithography. The above outlined integration issues involved in striking this balance are the subject of this paper, and they will be presented from a patterning perspective. Our exposures are made with ASML/900 full field scanner.
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