Nobuhiro Ogata

Application technology of stacked film with highly controlled edge structure

On the device manufacturing, the film edge control around the wafer edge has been critical at the point of edge control of deposited film. So far, the film edge control is operated by the wafer edge exposure system and/or the edge beam remover. The immersion lithography which is applied to the device generation below 65 nm node requires more additional and severe items for film edge control. These typical requirements are position control of coating film and wafer bevel cleanness. For examples, top coat film is widely applied to the immersion lithography. But this topcoat film is easily peeled off, if top coat film edge should be directly located on the wafer substrate like Si wafer. Thus, the edge position of topcoat film must be controlled very carefully. And the particle or residues on the wafer bevel is thought to be one of the causes to generate immersion defect. Wafer bevel must be clean in order to reduce the immersion defect. Then we have developed novel application technology in order to solve these kinds of immersion defectivities. This new application technology is based on rinse solution technology and new hardware concept. This new application technology can control the edge position of coating film with high accuracy and can reduce the particle and residues. We show the edge position accuracy using our application technology and furthermore, the stability of edge position accuracy in case of multi-layered resist process. We also show the cleanness of the wafer bevel area at the same time. And we can achieve the immersion process with wide process latitude with innovative application technology.