Mask corner chopping effect in OPC modeling

Author

Weiwei Wu ; Yu Shirui ; Quan Chen ; Zhibiao Mao ; Yu Zhang

Author_Institution

Shanghai Huali Microelectron. Corp., Shanghai, China

fYear

2015

fDate

15-16 March 2015

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

3

Abstract

Mask corner chop (MCC) is a key indicator of mask quality, which impacts photoresist critical dimension (ADI CD) significantly. The effect of MCC on ADI CD has a strong correlation with pattern CD and lithographic process condition. This study employed an optimized OPC model to simulate the effect of MCC on ADI CD for a variety of patterns and lithographic process conditions. Our simulation results showed that the effect of MCC on ADI CD could be fit in a second-order equation. The second-order coefficient (`A´-coefficient) described the strength of the MCC effect. `A´-coefficient was correlated with the slope of the aerial image intensity at threshold (I_th), which could be expressed from negative to positive value with increasing I_th. In this paper, we also provided a method for the selection of illumination conditions based the MCC effect under various lithography processes.

Keywords

masks; photoresists; proximity effect (lithography); MCC effect; OPC modeling; aerial image intensity; illumination conditions; lithographic process condition; mask corner chopping effect; mask quality; optical proximity correction; pattern critical dimension; photoresist critical dimension; second-order coefficient; second-order equation;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Semiconductor Technology International Conference (CSTIC), 2015 China

Conference_Location

Shanghai

ISSN

2158-2297

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CSTIC.2015.7153338

Filename

7153338