A dual-mode actinic EUV mask inspection tool

Yanwei Liu; Anton Barty; Eric Gullikson; John S. Taylor; J. Alexander Liddle; Obert Wood

doi:10.1117/12.598559

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6 May 2005 A dual-mode actinic EUV mask inspection tool

Yanwei Liu, Anton Barty, Eric Gullikson, John S. Taylor, J. Alexander Liddle, Obert Wood

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Proceedings Volume 5751, Emerging Lithographic Technologies IX; (2005) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.598559
Event: Microlithography 2005, 2005, San Jose, California, United States

Abstract

To qualify the performance of non-actinic inspection tools, a novel EUV mask inspection system has been installed at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) synchrotron facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Similar to the older generation actinic mask inspection tool1, the new system can operate in scanning mode, when mask blanks are scanned for defects using 13.5-nm in-band radiation to identify and map all locations on the mask that scatter a significant amount of EUV light. By modifying and optimizing beamline optics (11.3.2 at ALS) and replacing K-B focusing mirrors with a high quality Schwarzschild illuminator, the new system achieves an order of magnitude improvement on in-band EUV flux density at the mask, enabling faster scanning speed and higher sensitivity to smaller defects. Moreover, the system can also operate in imaging mode, when it becomes a zone-plate-based full-field EUV microscope with spatial resolution better than 100 nm. The microscope utilizes an off-axis setup, making it possible to obtain bright field images over a field-of-view of 5x5 um².

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Yanwei Liu, Anton Barty, Eric Gullikson, John S. Taylor, J. Alexander Liddle, and Obert Wood "A dual-mode actinic EUV mask inspection tool", Proc. SPIE 5751, Emerging Lithographic Technologies IX, (6 May 2005); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.598559

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