Effect of defects on extreme ultraviolet pellicle

Abstract

Over the past several years, people have accomplished a great deal of developing the Extreme-ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) technologies. However, several problems which disturb the mass-production of EUVL still remain. One of the problems is the defect control. In order to protect the mask from defect, the usage of the pellicle is essential. However the transmission loss caused by contamination can lead to the pattern error. Therefore it is necessary to find the acceptable thickness of the contamination layer that would cause the image error. The protection ability of the pellicle in terms of critical dimension variation is studied. Our study indicated that the process latitude difference is small enough to ignore whether the pellicle is used or not. In addition the protection ability of pellicle is good against the case of conformal contamination in terms of CD variation. © 2014 SPIE.