Removal of tin from exterme ultraviolet collector optics by an in-situ hydrogen plasma

EUV;collector optics;Sn;etching;reactive ion etching;hydrogen plasma

Elg, Daniel Tyler

关键词: EUV;    collector optics;    Sn;    etching;    reactive ion etching;    hydrogen plasma;   

Others  :  https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/95271/ELG-DISSERTATION-2016.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

美国|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as the semiconductor industry upheld Moore’s Law and continuously shrank device feature sizes, the wavelength of the lithography source remained at or below the resolution limit of the minimum feature size.Since 2001, however, the light source has been the 193nm ArF excimer laser.While the industry has managed to keep up with Moore’s Law, shrinking feature sizes without shrinking the lithographic wavelength has required extra innovations and steps that increase fabrication time, cost, and error.These innovations include immersion lithography and double patterning.Currently, the industry is at the 14 nm technology node.Thus, the minimum feature size is an order of magnitude below the exposure wavelength.For the 10 nm node, triple and quadruple patterning have been proposed, causing potentially even more cost, fabrication time, and error.Such a trend cannot continue indefinitely in an economic fashion, and it is desirable to decrease the wavelength of the lithography sources.Thus, much research has been invested in extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL), which uses 13.5 nm light.While much progress has been made in recent years, some challenges must still be solved in order to yield a throughput high enough for EUVL to be commercially viable for high-volume manufacturing (HVM).One of these problems is collector contamination.Due to the 92 eV energy of a 13.5 nm photon, EUV light must be made by a plasma, rather than by a laser.Specifically, the industrially-favored EUV source topology is to irradiate a droplet of molten Sn with a laser, creating a dense, hot laser-produced plasma (LPP) and ionizing the Sn to (on average) the +10 state.Additionally, no materials are known to easily transmit EUV.All EUV light must be collected by a collector optic mirror, which cannot be guarded by a window.The plasmas used in EUV lithography sources expel Sn ions and neutrals, which degrade the quality of collector optics.The mitigation of this debris is one of the main problems facing potential manufacturers of EUV sources.which can damage the collector optic in three ways: sputtering, implantation, and deposition.The first two damage processes are irreversible and are caused by the high energies (1-10 keV) of the ion debris.Debris mitigation methods have largely managed to reduce this problem by using collisions with H2 buffer gas to slow down the energetic ions.However, deposition can take place at all ion and neutral energies, and no mitigation method can deterministically deflect all neutrals away from the collector.Thus, deposition still takes place, lowering the collector reflectivity and increasing the time needed to deliver enough EUV power to pattern a wafer.Additionally, even once EUV reaches HVM insertion, source power will need to be continually increased as feature sizes continue to shrink; this increase in source power may potentially come at a cost of increased debris.Thus, debris mitigation solutions that work for the initial generation of commercial EUVL systems may not be adequate for future generations.An in-situ technology to clean collector optics without source downtime is required. which will require an in-situ technology to clean collector optics.The novel cleaning solution described in this work is to create the radicals directly on the collector surface by using the collector itself to drive a capacitively-coupled hydrogen plasma.This allows for radical creation at the desired location without requiring any delivery system and without requiring any source downtime.Additionally, the plasma provides energetic radicals that aid in the etching process.This work will focus on two areas.First, it will focus on experimental collector cleaning and EUV reflectivity restoration.Second, it will focus on developing an understanding of the fundamental processes governing Sn removal.It will be shown that this plasma technique can clean an entire collector optic and restore EUV reflectivity to MLMs without damaging them.Additionally, it will be shown that, within the parameter space explored, the limiting factor in Sn etching is not hydrogen radical flux or SnH4 decomposition but ion energy flux.This will be backed up by experimental measurements, as well as a plasma chemistry model of the radical density and a 3D model of SnH4 transport and redeposition.