Jones pupil decomposition and its lithographic imaging impacts

Abstract

The Jones pupil is a full description of imaging properties of projection lenses in optical lithography. The decomposition of the Jones pupil into components with clear physical meanings was studied previously; however, the decomposition method has not been studied systematically. To generalize the existing decomposition method, this work is aimed at finding all the decomposition methods and analyzing the lithographic imaging impacts. In this work, six decomposition methods are proposed, and the lithographic imaging impacts of the Jones components are studied and compared for all the decomposition methods. The results demonstrate that, although the decomposition methods are different, their lithographic impacts are identical. To be specific, apodization has a dominant impact on the critical dimension with a magnitude of 1.3 nm, and the impact of diattenuation is 0.3 nm. In contrast, the impacts of the other Jones components of aberration, birefringence, rotator, and ellipticity are negligible. This work gives a complete understanding of the imaging impacts of the Jones pupil.