Improved CD control and line edge roughness in E-beam lithography through combining proximity effect correction with gray scale techniques

摘要

A proximity effect correction (PEC) technique for E-beam lithography is presented which overcomes hardware limitations of many older E-beam writers regarding the number of physical dose classes by a unique combination of gray scale techniques with PEC using the Layout BEAMER software. The benefit is not only an improvement in critical dimension control, but also an improvement in line edge roughness (LER). Compared to standard PEC techniques the percentage line width deviation has been dramatically reduced by more than a factor of three.