Abstract

Backside defects are out of focus during wafer exposure by the mask thickness and cannot be directly imaged on wafer. However, backside defects will induce transmission variation during wafer exposure. When the size of backside defect is larger than 200 microns, the shadow of such particles will locally change the illumination conditions of the mask patterns and may result in a long range critical dimension (CD) variation on wafer depending on numerical aperture (NA) and pupil shape. Backside defects will affect both wafer CD and critical dimension uniformity (CDU), especially for two-dimensional (2D) structures. This paper focuses on the printability of backside defects on contact layer using annular and quadrupole illumination mode, as well as using different reticle blank material. It also targets for gaining better understanding of critical sizes of backside defects on contact layer for different reticle blanks. We have designed and manufactured two test reticles with repeating patterns of 28nm and 40nm technology node of contact layers. Programmed chrome defects of varying size are placed on the backside opposite to the repeating front side patterns in order to measure the spatial variation of transmission and wafer CD. The test mask was printed on a bare silicon wafer, and the printed features measured for size by spatial sampling. We have investigated two contact layers with different illumination conditions. One is advance binary with single exposure; another is phase shift mask with double exposure. Wafer CD variation for different backside defect sizes are demonstrated for the two contact layers. The comparison between backside defect size with inter-field and intra-field CD variation is also discussed.

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