Investigation of scum type growing defects on attenuated PSM and its prevention

The abnormal growing defect (we called this defect 'scum haze defect') in the photomask which is generated during the wafer lithography process is very important issue on semiconductor industry. Because wafer yield loss could be caused by the mask CD variation and the transmittance loss due to the growing defects on the photomask, many studies have been done about the mechanism and the solution of the general type growing defects such as haze and Cr migration so far, However we still need to clarify some abnormal types of the growing defects such as scum haze defect. In this paper, we investigated the generation mechanism and prevention techniques of the scum haze defect on the attenuated phase shift mask. This defect composed of CrOx is caused by the increase of the accumulated exposure energy on photomask. This phenomenon is remarkably similar to the Cr migration on binary mask. But, the apparent difference is that this scum type defect is observed on the attenuated phase shift mask which mainly consists of MoSiON film, and it is difficult to control this defect because of its irregular generation characteristic. Additionally, this defect is not generally removed through the conventional wet cleaning process but it only could be removed by a kind of plasma treatment. In this study, the difference of generation mechanism between the scum haze defect and the general haze was discussed, and the optimal process for controlling scum haze defect in the mask manufacturing was described.