It is just me or is 8:00am too early for the first technical talk of the day?\u00a0 At least on Wednesday the 8:00am talk was an excellent one.\u00a0 Oktay Yildirim of ASML presented a basic but very useful roughness model.\u00a0 Alas, I had to run out before the end of his paper to give my own paper in the metrology session.\u00a0 The problem with stochastics becoming the major theme of this year\u2019s conference is that there have been stochastics papers everywhere, often conflicting with each other.\u00a0 The morning metrology session was all roughness measurement.\u00a0 Of course, I was pleased with Barton Lane\u2019s presentation of SEM errors and their impact on roughness measurements, but since I was a coauthor that is to be expected.\u00a0 I also gave my own paper on a new method for roughness characterization \u2013 the level crossing method.\u00a0 I was especially impressed with Dr. Serap Savari\u2019s work on applying modern algorithmic techniques for power spectral density (PSD) estimation.\u00a0 I guess I\u2019m going to have to figure out what a discrete prolate spheroidal sequence is.<\/p>\n
Ravi Bonan of IBM went back to an old idea that remains underutilized today \u2013 the programed roughness mask.\u00a0 Similarly, Sergey Babin of aBeam created a metrology test structure with deterministic randomness.\u00a0 Please don\u2019t ask me to explain.\u00a0 The core concept of both is the same \u2013 create small structures with programmed \u201croughness\u201d to test our measurement and analysis capabilities.\u00a0 More creative ideas in these regards will certainly be welcome.<\/p>\n
A creative idea came from Harm Dillen of ASML.\u00a0 He used an array of very dense contact holes to measure the field distortion of scanning electron microscope images.\u00a0 His application was edge placement error measurement, but as Barton Lane described earlier it also impacts roughness measurements.\u00a0 Modeling the distortion using a typical first-order overlay model allows the systematic contribution (about 0.6 nm RMS for his data) to be subtracted out.\u00a0 This amount of distortion is enough to have a quite noticeable on line-edge roughness measurement.\u00a0 I can\u2019t wait to try this method out.<\/p>\n
Alex Robinson of Irresistible Materials gave a talk on increasing the sensitivity of EUV resists.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t attend.\u00a0 But he did corner me later and run through it with me.\u00a0 His cartoon chemistry looked very interesting \u2013 a believable mechanism for achieving second order acid amplification chemistry.\u00a0 Now that such chemistry looks possible, I\u2019ll have to think about the roughness implications more carefully.\u00a0 That\u2019s the problem with stochastics \u2013 nothing is obvious the first time you think about it.<\/p>\n
The evening ended with another round of excellent hospitality suites (thanks to all of the companies that feed me so well throughout the week), with the PROLITH party always being my favorite.\u00a0 For all of you who have asked me if my new company (Fractilia) will revive the traditional bathtub party of my old company (FINLE), the answer is no.\u00a0 The bathtub party must remain the stuff of lithography legend; Fractilia will create its own traditions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is just me or is 8:00am too early for the first technical talk of the day?\u00a0 At least on Wednesday the 8:00am talk was an excellent one.\u00a0 Oktay Yildirim of ASML presented a basic but very useful roughness model.\u00a0 Alas, I had to run out before the end of his paper to give my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=521"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":522,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions\/522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}