The EUV lithography resist screening activities in H2-2022

EUV resist materials are crucial for enabling next-generation lithographic technologies that aim to achieve high-volume manufacturing (HVM) at sub-5 nm nodes. In this study, we report an extensive performance characterization of EUV photoresists for future high-NA EUV lithography. We investigated the performance of various resists using the EUV interference lithography tool at the Swiss Light Source (SLS) within the framework of a collaboration between the Paul Scherrer Institute and ASML. This paper presents the major outcomes of the work conducted in the second half of 2022. Important performance characteristics taken into account in this study are resolution or half-pitch (HP), dose-to-size (DtS) and line-width roughness (LWR). To evaluate the overall performance of the resists, we used the Z-factor. We investigated both chemically amplified resists (CAR) and non-CAR materials. CARs from two vendors achieved a resolution down to 11 nm half-pitch, while multi-trigger resists (MTR) reached a resolution of 13 nm. In comparison, MTRs demonstrated better Z-factor values owing to their high sensitivity. In addition, we investigated the effect of underlayers on the performance of metal organic resists (MOR). We, finally, discuss the overall progress in resist performance over recent years. We observed a steady improvement across several resist platforms, which is encouraging for global EUV resist development towards high-NA EUVL.