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Metrology for electron-beam lithography and resist contrast at the sub-10 nm scale

2010; Volume: 28; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1116/1.3501359

2166-2754

Huigao Duan, Vitor R. Manfrinato, Joel K. W. Yang, Donny Winston, B. Cord, Karl K. Berggren,

Integrated Circuits and Semiconductor Failure Analysis

Exploring the resolution limit of electron-beam lithography is of great interest both scientifically and technologically. However, when electron-beam lithography approaches its resolution limit, imaging and metrology of the fabricated structures by using standard scanning electron microscopy become difficult. In this work, the authors adopted transmission-electron and atomic-force microscopies to improve the metrological accuracy and to analyze the resolution limit of electron-beam lithography. With these metrological methods, the authors found that sub-5 nm sparse features could be readily fabricated by electron-beam lithography, but dense 16 nm pitch structures were difficult to yield. Measurements of point- and line-spread functions suggested that the resolution in fabricating sub-10 nm half-pitch structures was primarily limited by the resist-development processes, meaning that the development rates depended on pattern density and/or length scale.