A novel plasma setup for realistic material and optics life-time testing

Inside Extreme Ultra Violet (EUV) lithography machines multiple scanner materials and components interact with the so-called EUV-generated hydrogen plasma. To gain knowledge about these interactions we conduct controlled experiments using laboratory setups at TNO, where selected properties of the EUV-generated plasma are mimicked. In this paper we present a novel plasma setup called EBR (Electron Beam Research), which uses an electron beam to generate a lowtemperature and high-flux hydrogen plasma. The properties of the e-beam generated plasma like ion flux, peak ion energy, radical-to-ion ratio are similar to the EUV-generated scanner plasma. Unlike any other plasma facility at TNO, the EBR setup can produce a pulsed plasma with a tunable pulse duration in 40 ns to 1s range at frequency varying from 1 Hz to 700 000 Hz. Thanks to that also the time-dependent behavior of the ion-flux from the scanner plasma is reproduced inside EBR for more realistic material and optics life-time testing.