Progress in EUV resists for contact holes printing using EUV interference lithography

Abstract

Using high-resolution extreme ultraviolet interference lithography (EUV-IL), we investigated contact hole/pillars printing performance of several EUV resist platforms for the high-NA EUV lithography. We compared the dose and local critical dimension uniformity (LCDU) of the three chemically-amplified resists (CARs) with the best performance for printing contact holes (CHs) at half pitch (HP) of 24 and 20 nm. One of the CARs showed the lowest LCDU, 2.3 and 2.2 nm with lowest dose 16.4 and 21.1 mJ/cm2 for HP 24 and 20 nm, respectively. With the inorganic resist we obtained 38.8 mJ/cm2 with an LCDU of 1.3 nm for HP 20 nm pillars. We have also studied the effects of the resist thickness and post-exposure baking (PEB) temperature on the dose and LCDU. These results show that there are promising CAR and non-CAR resists for CH printing towards high-NA EUVL.