The SEMATECH Berkeley MET: extending EUV learning to 16-nm half pitch

Several high-performing resists identified in the past two years have been exposed at the 0.3-numerical-aperture (NA) SEMATECH Berkeley Microfield Exposure Tool (BMET) with an engineered dipole illumination optimized for 18-nm half pitch. Five chemically amplified platforms were found to support 20-nm dense patterning at a film thickness of approximately 45 nm. At 19-nm half pitch, however, scattered bridging kept all of these resists from cleanly resolving larger areas of dense features. At 18-nm half pitch, none of the resists were are able to cleanly resolve a single line within a bulk pattern. With this same illumination a directly imageable metal oxide hardmask showed excellent performance from 22-nm half pitch to 17-nm half pitch, and good performance at 16-nm half pitch, closely following the predicted aerial image contrast. This indicates that observed limitations of the chemically amplified resists are indeed coming from the resist and not from a shortcoming of the exposure tool. The imageable hardmask was also exposed using a Pseudo Phase-Shift-Mask technique and achieved clean printing of 15-nm half pitch lines and modulation all the way down to the theoretical 12.5-nm resolution limit of the 0.3-NA SEMATECH BMET.