Correction of resist heating effect on variable shaped beam mask writer

Abstract

The specifications for critical dimension (CD) accuracy and line edge roughness are getting tighter to promote every photomask manufacturer to choose electron beam resists of lower sensitivity. When the resist is exposed by too many electrons, it is excessively heated up to have higher sensitivity at a higher temperature, which results in degraded CD uniformity. This effect is called “resist heating effect” and is now the most critical error source in CD control on a variable shaped beam (VSB) mask writer. We have developed an on-tool, real-time correction system for the resist heating effect. The system is composed of correction software based on a simple thermal diffusion model and computational hardware equipped with more than 100 graphical processing unit chips. We have demonstrated that the designed correction accuracy was obtained and the runtime of correction was sufficiently shorter than the writing time. The system is ready to be deployed for our VSB mask writers to retain the writing time as short as possible for lower sensitivity resists by removing the need for increased pass count.