A holistic approach of focus control for 193nm immersion lithography for critical layers in 28nm and 14nm FD-SOI technologies ; Approche holistique du contrôle du focus en photolithographie 193nm immersion pour les niveaux critiques en 28nm et 14nm FD-SOI
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Media type:
E-Book
Title:
A holistic approach of focus control for 193nm immersion lithography for critical layers in 28nm and 14nm FD-SOI technologies ; Approche holistique du contrôle du focus en photolithographie 193nm immersion pour les niveaux critiques en 28nm et 14nm FD-SOI
Published:
[Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar]: HAL CCSD, 2016
Language:
French
Origination:
University thesis:
Dissertation, HAL CCSD, 2016
Footnote:
Description:
The increasing complexity in chip integration (co-integration, increasing diversity of matérials…) and the race to dimension shrinkage are the two main drivers of research in microelectronics today. The optical limitations of lithography have been reached some years ago so that double patterning is now a typical process flow in production and helps reducing pattern size and increasing design density. Because of these, the manufacturing itself needs to be more tightly controlled in order to avoid marginalities. Which will affect the chip operation. The cross-effects between these elements are more numerous and their ratio in the total budget is larger whereas the needs for tighter process control are rising. This thesis presents a holistic approach of the control of one of the main parameters for photolithography: focus. It is directly linked to the quality of the image transferred into the photoresist during exposure. Its control is then essential. Variability sources for focus are manifold and diverse: laser, mask, optical column, servo-controllers, wafer flatness, integration, design, substrate reflectivity, material quality etc. All these are added to each other, leading to the creation of defects which can be catastrophic such as shorts. The first objective of this work was to show current challenges raised by STMicroelectronics new technologies, specifically photolithography-wise and focus-wise. A budget breakdown of two critical processes (Metal line patterning in 28nm FD-SOI and Contact patterning for 14nm FD-SOI) has been established which gives the impact of every effect. The product layout effects were evaluated to represent up to 20% of the complete budget and 50% of its intra-chip component. Topography contributes to a large part of these effects and offline measurements showed up to 32nm 3s of height variation in a single field. This may lead to local defocuses of the same order of magnitude. The usable depth of field being about 60 to 70nm for the studied layers, it is clear that focus control is really tight here. The holistic approach of topology leaded to the use of data mining tooling as PLS regression (Partial least Square). It allowed the highlighting of main causes of topography, the creation of a predictive model of topology and the evaluation of several improvement solutions. One may distinguish palliative" and "curative" solutions. In the first category, on may put scanner levelling improvements which might be effective for every technology without any modification to make on integration and design. The emulated wafer map methodology providing on-product focus non-uniformities without any measurements is also a solution for investigation. "Curative" solutions may concern the mitigation of risk factors by modifying the design topography built-up main factors