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An x-ray lithography system has three distinct components: 1) the storage ring or synchrotron, which serves as the light source; 2) the beamline, which has optical elements for collecting, collimating, […], Key issues for the exposure system are discussed, including the x-ray resist, defect-free masks with acceptable CD and registration errors, advanced vertical steppers, and convenient x-rays sources.

Extendibility of a technology can be evaluated by benchmarking present state of the art, and then extrapolating to future generations on the basis of established scaling rules. In the present […]

Shrinking design rules and reduced process tolerances require tight control of CD linewidth, feature shape, and profile of the printed geometry. The Holistic Metrology approach consists of utilizing all available information from different sources like data from other toolsets, multiple optical channels, multiple targets, etc. to optimize metrology recipe and improve measurement performance. Various in-line critical dimension (CD) metrology toolsets like Scatterometry OCD (Optical CD), CD-SEM (CD Scanning Electron Microscope) and CD-AFM (CD Atomic Force Microscope) are typically utilized individually in fabs. Each of these toolsets has its own set of limitations that are intrinsic to specific measurement technique and algorithm. Here we define "Hybrid Metrology" to be the use of any two or more metrology toolsets in combination to measure the same dataset. We demonstrate the benefits of the Hybrid Metrology on two test structures: 22nm node Gate Develop Inspect (DI) & 32nm node FinFET Gate Final Inspect (FI). We will cover measurement results obtained using typical BKM as well as those obtained by utilizing the Hybrid Metrology approach. Measurement performance will be compared using standard metrology metrics for example accuracy and precision.