San #24 Nongseo-Ri, Kiheung-Eup, Yongin-City, Korea, As the design rule of lithography becomes smaller, printability of reticle defect to wafer is critical for the photomask manufacturing technology. In order to improve the controllability of reticle defects, inspection and repair systems are expanding their capability by continuously modifying hardware and software. This is a good solution to detect and review the defect but it is indirect approaching to reduce the defect in the photomask process. To produce the photornask of defect free or low defect density, effort is needed to improve the capability of defect control in the mask-making process and to evaluate the source of hard defect as well as soft defect.In this paper, we concern the defect source and the feature of printed defects in photomask manufacturing steps. We also discuss the efforts to eliminate the defect source and to control the maskmaking process with low defect density. In order to eliminate the source of defects, we partition the mask-making process with defect inspection system, SIF27 TeraStar and Lasertec MD2000, and review a defect shape with CD SEM and AFM. And we compare printed defects, which exist in each process steps, after dry etching process.
Dry etching has become critical to manufacture the resolution enhancement technique (RET) mask in the ArF lithography. Among RET masks, alternating phase shift mask (PSM) and chrome-less phase lithography (CPL) mask require the formation of 180 degrees phase differences by quartz dry etching. There are many error factors, which can influence CD uniformities on mask and wafers, in Quartz dry etch step such as sidewall angle, phase MTT and uniformity, micro-trench, and morphology. Furthermore, quartz depth is hard to control because there is no stopping layer for quartz etching. Additionally, Pattern profile of Chrome layer is very important, because chrome profile affect sidewall angle for quartz. We have simulated and investigated to identify the influences of many error factors on RET. Consequently, we investigated characteristics of quartz dry etching process performance and the influences on resolution, which can be improved by dry etch parameters.
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