Abstract
Pattern roughness is expected to be an important issue in semiconductor scaling going forward. We performed smoothing of ArF photoresists (PRs) by a PR hardening technique called direct current superposition (DCS) cure,<sup>1</sup>) and we showed that this technique can achieve a roughness smoothing effect for PRs having various line edge roughness (LER) conditions. Additionally, we showed that this smoothing technique has many process advantages from the viewpoint of lithography, such as an improved mask error enhancement factor (MEEF), expanded process window, and improved local critical dimension (CD) uniformity. We consider that these advantages occur because of a CD healing effect caused by linear dependence of shrink amount with line width due to the DCS cure technique.
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