Impact of inter-mask CD error on OPC accuracy in resolution of 90 nm and below

Ken Ozawa; Shunichiro Sato; Hidetoshi Ohnuma

doi:10.1117/12.485380

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26 June 2003 Impact of inter-mask CD error on OPC accuracy for resolutions of 90 nm and below

Ken Ozawa, Shunichiro Sato, Hidetoshi Ohnuma

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Proceedings Volume 5040, Optical Microlithography XVI; (2003) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.485380
Event: Microlithography 2003, 2003, Santa Clara, California, United States

Abstract

Because of the mask error enhancement factor (MEEF), iso-dense biases of mask patterns are amplified when the image is transferred to a wafer. A slight critical-dimension (CD) difference between an OPC test mask and an OPCed mask may cause a significant OPC error on the wafer. The impact of the mask CD error on OPC accuracy has never been evaluated, however, to evaluate the impact of the inter-mask CD error (IMCDE), we measured the CD errors of various line-and-space patterns on attenuated phase-shifting masks for ArF exposure. We investigated the effect of IMCDE and the iso-dense biases of test-mask patterns on OPC accuracy. We found that a degree of IMCDE is tolerable in attenuated phase-shifting ArF masks. This tolerable degree of IMCDE is useful to gauge the effectiveness of the OPC, with an eye to developing a lithographic process for semiconductor production. Furthermore, based on experimental results showing that a wafer CD is controllable when scanner conditions such as numerical aperture (NA) and partial coherence factor (sigma) are optimized, a new mask-matching method to compensate for the IMCDE is proposed.

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Ken Ozawa, Shunichiro Sato, and Hidetoshi Ohnuma "Impact of inter-mask CD error on OPC accuracy for resolutions of 90 nm and below", Proc. SPIE 5040, Optical Microlithography XVI, (26 June 2003); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.485380

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