K1 factor for development and mass-production of memory devices has been decreased down to below 0.30 in recent years. Process technology has responded with extreme resolution enhancement technologies (RET) and much more complex OPC technologies than before. ArF immersion lithography is expected to remain the major patterning technology through under 35 nm node, where the degree of process difficulties and the sensitivity to process variations grow even higher. So, Design for manufacturing (DFM) is proposed to lower the degree of process difficulties and advanced process control (APC) is required to reduce the process variations. However, both DFM and APC need much feed-back from the wafer side such as hot spot inspection results and total CDU measurements at the lot, wafer, field and die level. In this work, we discuss a new design based metrology which can compare SEM image with CAD data and measure the whole CD deviations from the original layouts in a full die. It can provide the full information of hot spots and the whole CD distribution diagram of various transistors in peripheral regions as well as cell layout. So, it is possible to analyze the root cause of the CD distribution of some specific transistors or cell layout, such as OPC error, mask CDU, lens aberrations or etch process variation and so on. The applications of this new inspection tool will be introduced and APC using the analysis result will be presented in detail.

Date Published: 5 April 2007
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 6518, Metrology, Inspection, and Process Control for Microlithography XXI, 651821 (5 April 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.712051

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6518:
Metrology, Inspection, and Process Control for Microlithography XXI
Chas N. Archie, Editor(s)