Optical characterization of 193nm amorphous carbon ARC films

Abstract

In this study, the optical properties of amorphous carbon (aC) ARC films are investigated using an Opti-probe OP7341, and a metrology solution that robustly measures a broad range of process conditions is presented. We find that the aC material is consistent with uni-axial anisotropy, and that this effect may have important implications for photolithography. These results are obtained through the combination of multiple technologies in one tool: spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE); spectroscopic reflectometry or broadband (BB), with a wavelength range of 190-840 nm; single wavelength (673 nm) but multiple incident angle beam profile reflectometry (BPR) and beam profile ellipsometry (BPE), and single wavelength (633nm) absolute ellipsometry (AE). The combination of technologies at multiple angles and wavelengths provides additional optical information and sensitivity not possible with single-technology approaches. A complex wavelength dependent anisotropy model was developed for this analysis, and is compared with a real anisotropy model. The complex anisotropy model and the effective medium approximation (EMA) with two and three components were applied to a set of 12 wafer set with thickness swing aC films in the range of 500-750 a as well as a second set of 23 pre- and post- etch wafers. The complex anisotropy model clearly has the advantage of best fit the BPR profiles along with the SE Fourier coefficients. The etch rate obtained by the complex anisotropy also showed a much narrower variation as compared with the EMA2 and EMA32 models with the real anisotropy.