Contributions to innate material roughness in resist

A method has been developed to probe the Innate Material Roughness (IMR) of resist materials. We have applied this to EUV and 248 nm resists to deconvolute the material contributions to roughness: 1) the polymer alone, 2) interaction between the polymer, photoacid generator (PAG), base quencher, and photolysis byproducts, 3) the effects of exposure, and 4) development. We studied ESCAP based resists (with more limited data on APEX polymers), an iodonium nonaflate PAG, a tetabutyl ammonium hydroxide (TBAH) base quencher, and standard tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH) development.