Revisiting the mechanisms involved in Line Width Roughness smoothing of 193 nm photoresist patterns during HBr plasma treatment

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HBr plasma treatments are widely used in nanoscale lithographic technologies to increase the plasma etch resistance of 193 nm photoresist masks as well as to decrease their Line Width Roughness (LWR). VUV irradiation of the photoresist is known to play a major role in this process by inducing polymer chains rearrangement and finally LWR reduction. However, in the plasma environment (i.e., with radical and ion bombardment), the interaction layer formed at the resist surface perturbs this mechanism and a lower LWR reduction is achieved compared to VUV only treatment. So far the nature of the interaction layer, its formation mechanism and its relation with the resist pattern LWR were all unclear. In this paper, we show that a graphite-like layer is formed on the resist patterns by the redeposition of carbon-based species originating from the plasma dissociation of outgassed photo-etched resist moieties. We show that the presence of this layer inhibits the LWR minimization and causes an increase in the LWR when it becomes thick enough (i.e., a few nanometers). We present evidences that the difference in the mechanical properties of the graphite-like top layer which coats the resist patterns and the bulk of the resist patterns is correlated to the LWR after plasma treatment. We can conclude that the optimization of an HBr cure process relies on the minimization of the carbon redeposition while keeping a significant VUV light flux and we show that this can be achieved by using pulsed plasma processes.