Subnanometer alignment system for x-ray lithography

Abstract

Proximity printing with soft x rays is a leading contender for very large scale integrated circuit lithography below 0.25 μm. It will require overlay accuracy far below the 100 nm (3σ) typical of today’s systems. In addition, it should use wafer marks which permit planar resist flow, so their apparent position is not distorted. We report an alignment system which uses a linear zone plate on the mask to focus laser light into a line on the wafer. The wafer mark is the boundary between two adjacent fine pitch gratings. These gratings diffract the light into photodiodes. The gratings either differ slightly in pitch or by 180° in phase. This configuration minimizes the disturbance to the resist as it flows over the alignment mark. In the case of gratings with slightly different pitch the light from each grating is detected by one-half of a split photodiode. This arrangement has good sensitivity and a very wide capture range. The phase shift gratings have reduced capture range but enhanced sensitivity because of the improved resolution from the phase shift. We observe that the full width at half-maximum (FWHM) of the alignment signal is 0.6 μm when the FWHM of the zone plate focus is 1.0 μm. By collecting all of the light focused by the zone plate and diffracted by the gratings we obtain strong alignment signals with signal to noise ratios of more than 1000:1. We routinely obtain a reproducibility in a bench setup equivalent to less than 1 nm (3σ). This alignment technique is currently undergoing installation in a commercially available x-ray exposure tool.