The art of photomask materials for low-k1-193nm lithography

Abstract

The resolution of photomask patterns were improved with a hardmask (HM) system. The system which is thin Sicompounds layer is easily etched by the hyper-thin resist (below 100nm thickness). The HM material has sufficient etching selectivity against the chrome-compounds which is the second layer chrome absorber for the phase-shifter. This hardmask layer has been completely removed during the phase-shifter etching. It means that the conventional phase-shit mask (PSM) has been made with the ultimately high-resolution without configuration changes. Below 50nm resolution of PSM was made with 90nm thickness resist on HM layer in this paper. The CD bias between a resist feature CD and a chrome feature CD was almost zero (below 1nm) in the optimized etching condition. We confirmed that the mask performances were the equal to COMS (Cr-HM on MoSi binary mask) in resolution and CD linearity. The performances of hardmask blanks will be defined by resist performance because of almost zero bias.