Finally, a day where my only responsibility was to go to papers!\u00a0 Dan Sobieski of Lam Research described combined etch and hardening techniques that could reduce microbridging and microbreaks in lines and spaces, just not at the same time.\u00a0 It would be interesting to try these techniques combined with Peter De Bisschop\u2019s defect analysis to see how much the defect-free process window could be opened up.\u00a0 Toshiharu Wada of TEL described an area-selective deposition to reduce low-frequency roughness.\u00a0 A resist line is coated with some material such that the deposition rate is slower in a narrow space than a wider one.\u00a0 If roughness made a space wider, higher deposition rates would tend to fill it in more.\u00a0 If a space were narrower, slower deposition rates would fill it in less.\u00a0 The result would be a space that varied less after deposition than before, even at low frequencies.\u00a0 His unbiased PSD (power spectral density) data showed that it actually worked.\u00a0 An important caveat is that it may work properly only at one pitch (Wada-san\u2019s results were at 36nm pitch).\u00a0 More work is required, and I look forward to seeing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Switching to the metrology session I heard\nseveral SEM talks. Hitachi explained\nthat one of their biggest priorities is tool matching among a fleet of 10 to\n100 CD-SEM tools, where tool matching specs can be extremely challenging to\nmeet. Sample variation, tool variation, environmental\nvariation, and tool calibration errors all contribute about equally to this\noverall budget. Another Hitachi paper\ndescribed progress in in-situ aberration measurement and adjustment in a\nprototype CD-SEM to shrink the spot size by about 2X, with subsequent\nresolution improvements. They\ndemonstrated the technology with a 100eV beam energy (since the spot size is\npretty large at that voltage), but I hope to see results at 500V soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was good to see STMicro back at the\nconference, and Bertrand Le-Gratiet gave a great talk on monitoring and\ncontrolling SRAM contact holes using massive CD measurements. It is interesting that at the 28-nm node\nstochastic variations (local CDU) are by far the dominant source of variation. Stochastics have been with us for a long\ntime, but we are just now putting effort into seeing that. Finally, I enjoyed Vassilios Constantoudis comparing\nan edge placement error (EPE) metric to a line-edge roughness metric for\nsynthetic rough features, showing the important role of correlation length in EPE\nof short features.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, Wednesday always ends with a beer (or\ntwo) with my friends at the KLA PROLITH party. \nCheers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Finally, a day where my only responsibility was to go to papers!\u00a0 Dan Sobieski of Lam Research described combined etch and hardening techniques that could reduce microbridging and microbreaks in lines and spaces, just not at the same time.\u00a0 It would be interesting to try these techniques combined with Peter De Bisschop\u2019s defect analysis to […]<\/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-586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586","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=586"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":587,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions\/587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}