Novel conformal organic antireflective coatings for advanced I-line lithography

Abstract

Flash memory chips are playing a critical role in semiconductor devices due to increased popularity of hand held electronic communication devices such as cell phones and PDAs (personal Digital Assistants). Flash memory offers two primary advantages in semiconductor devices. First, it offers flexibility of in-circuit programming capability to reduce the loss from programming errors and to significantly reduce commercialization time to market for new devices. Second, flash memory has a double density memory capability through stacked gate structures which increases the memory capability and thus saves significantly on chip real estate. However, due to stacked gate structures the requirements for manufacturing of flash memory devices are significantly different from traditional memory devices. Stacked gate structures also offer unique challenges to lithographic patterning materials such as Bottom Anti-Reflective Coating (BARC) compositions used to achieve CD control and to minimize standing wave effect in photolithography. To be applicable in flash memory manufacturing a BARC should form a conformal coating on high topography of stacked gate features as well as provide the normal anti-reflection properties for CD control. In this paper we report on a new highly conformal advanced i-line BARC for use in design and manufacture of flash memory devices. Conformal BARCs being significantly thinner in trenches than the planarizing BARCs offer the advantage of reducing BARC overetch and thus minimizing resist thickness loss.