The development of multiple e-beam lithography equipment is seen as an alternative for next generation lithography. However, similarly to EUV lithography, this technology faces important challenges in controlling the contamination of the optics due to deposition of carbon layer induced by the outgassed chemical species from resist under electron bombardment. An experimental setup was designed and built at LETI to study the outgassed species and observe the carbon layer. In this setup, resist coated wafers 100 mm size are exposed under a 5 kV e-beam gun. During exposure, byproducts from outgassed species are monitored with a Residual Gas Analyzer (RGA). The identification of outgassed chemical species is done with an ex-situ TD-GC-MS analysis (ThermoDesorption-Gaz Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry). In a second part of this investigation, we observed the contamination carbon layer growth induced by the outgassing. Thereby, we fabricated a device which consists of a silicon membrane with micro-machined apertures. During e-beam exposure, this device simulates the multiple parallel beams of the optic system of a maskless lithography tool. The deposited contamination layer on device is then observed and thickness measured under SEM. In this paper, we present the results of outgassing and contamination on 3 chemically amplified resists showing that contamination is not directly dependent of the overall outgassing rate but on first order of the outgassing from Photo Acid Generator (PAG). It also reports on the performance in reducing outgassing and contamination of applying a top-coat layer on top of the resist and shows that reduction is more important for contamination than for outgassing.

Date Published: 8 October 2014
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 9235, Photomask Technology 2014, 923520 (8 October 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2066152

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9235:
Photomask Technology 2014
Paul W. Ackmann; Naoya Hayashi, Editor(s)