Applying photolithography-friendly design to e-beam direct writing for 65-nm node and beyond

摘要

It is commonly known that maskless lithography is the most effective technology to reduce costs and shorten the timeneed for recent photo-mask making techniques. In mass production, however, lithography using photo-masks is usedbecause that method has high productivity. Therefore a solution is to use maskless lithography to make prototypes anduse optical lithography for volume production. On the other hand, using an exposure technology that is different fromthat used for mass production causes different physical phenomena to occur in the lithography process, and differentimages are formed. These differences have an effect on the characteristics of the semiconductor device being made. Anissue arises because the chip characteristics are different for the sample chip and the fmal chip of the same product. Thisissue also requires other processes to be changed besides switching to the lithography process. In our previous paper, wereported on new developments in an electron-beam exposure data-generating system for making printed images of adifferent exposure source correspond to each other in lithographic printing systems, which are electron beam lithographyand photolithography. In this paper, we discuss whether the feasibility of this methodology has been demonstrated foruse in a production environment. Patterns which are generated with our method are complicated. To apply the method toa production environment we needed a breakthrough, and we overcame some difficult issues.