Cryogenic cleaning of tin-drop contamination on surfaces relevant for extreme ultraviolet light collection

Improvement of tool reliability and uptime is a current focus in the development of extreme ultraviolet lithography. The lifetime of collection mirrors for extreme ultraviolet light in tin-based plasma light sources is limited considerably by contamination with thick tin deposits that cannot be removed sufficiently fast by plasma etching. For tin droplet splats sticking to large substrates, we have developed and compared several efficient cleaning techniques based on cryogenic cooling. A silicon carbide substrate and different silicon wafer samples with up to 6 in. diameter with the surface uncoated, multilayer-coated, unstructured, and grating-structured were tested. After tin dripping onto heated samples, embrittlement of droplet contamination is induced in situ by stresses during phase transformation, following the initiation of tin pest with seed crystals of gray tin. Conversion of initially adhesive deposits to loose gray tin has been reached in less than 24 h on all tested surfaces by continuous cooling with cold nitrogen vapor to temperatures in the range of −30 to −50 °C. Alternatively, stress-initiated tin removal by delamination of β-Sn droplet splats has been attained via contraction strain induced by strong cooling to temperatures of around −120 °C. Profilometry has been used to analyze the bottom side of tin droplet splats removed from a grating-structured wafer. The in situ tin cleaning techniques give results comparable to fast ex situ cleaning that has been achieved either by sample immersion in liquid nitrogen or by splat removal after CO2 snowflake aerosol impact using a hand-held jet-nozzle. The implementation of the in situ phase conversion concept for the cleaning of collector mirrors in commercial light sources for lithography is discussed.