Thomas Cardolaccia

Materials for single-etch double patterning process: surface curing agent and thermal cure resist

Two different pattern curing techniques were developed to stabilize first lithographic images for the single-etch double patterning process. The first method uses a surface curing agent (SCA) that is coated on top of the patterned surface to form a protective coating layer during the curing bake process. It was found that the surface curing process with SCA offers minimum CD changes before and after the double patterning process. Virtually no CD change was observed with the first lithographic images at various curing bake temperatures ranging from 120 ~160°C indicating the curing reaction is limited on the patterned surface. The second method uses a thermal cure resist (TCR) that is a special 193nm photoresist with a crosslinkable functional group to form an insoluble network upon heating at higher temperature. A single-step curing process of the first lithographic images was achieved using TCR by baking the patterned images at 180°C for 60sec. A cross-line contact hole double patterning method was used to evaluate these two different curing techniques and both SCA and TCR successfully demonstrated their capability to print 45nm contact holes with excellent CD uniformity in immersion lithography (1.35NA) with a 45nm half pitch mask. It was also confirmed that both SCA and TCR can be extended to the top-coat free immersion double patterning process using an embedded barrier layer technique.

Evolution of negative tone development photoresists for ArF lithography

The negative tone development process enables the printing of dark field features on wafer using bright field masks with a manufacturing capability for back-end-of-line processing. The performance of NTD photoresist has advanced along two fronts: namely common process window for dense and semi-dense contacts and the resolution and line width roughness of isolated trenches. Furthermore, the chemistry has evolved by the convergence of capability for printing line/space and contact hole using a single photoresist formulation. The process performance of a series of NTD photoresist is reported. Particular focus is placed on process latitude, CDU, thickness control, LWR and resolution limit.

Understanding dissolution behavior of 193nm photoresists in organic solvent developers

Herein, we investigate the dissolution behavior of 193-nm chemically amplified resist in different organic solvents at a mechanistic level. We previously reported the effect of solvent developers on the negative tone development (NTD) process in both dry and immersion lithography, and demonstrated various resist performance parameters such as photospeed, critical dimension uniformity, and dissolution rate contrast are strongly affected by chemical nature of the organic developer. We further pursued the investigation by examining the dependence of resist dissolution behavior on their solubility properties using Hansen Solubility Parameter (HSP). The effects of monomer structure, and resist composition, and the effects of different developer chemistry on dissolution behaviors were evaluated by using laser interferometry and quartz crystal microbalance. We have found that dissolution behaviors of methacrylate based resists are significantly different in different organic solvent developers such as OSDTM-1000 Developer* and n-butyl acetate (nBA), affecting their resist performance. This study reveals that understanding the resist dissolution behavior helps to design robust NTD materials for higher resolution imaging.