Study of the mask materials for PTD process and NTD process in practical ArF immersion lithography

In this report, we compared the lithographic performances between the conventional positive tone development (PTD) process and the negative tone development (NTD) process, using the lithography simulation. We selected the MoSi-binary mask and conventional 6% attenuated phase shift mask as mask materials. The lithographic performance was evaluated and compared after applying the optical proximity correction (OPC). The evaluation items of lithographic performance were the aerial image profile, the aerial image contrast, normalized image log slope (NILS), mask error enhancement factor (MEEF), and the bossung curves, etc. The designs for the evaluation were selected the simple contact hole and the metal layer sample design.