UK company to develop first immersion litho tool with SEMATECH
"WeÕre pleased to continue our history of providing the first imaging tools for companies to use in developing and enhancing their resist formulations, evaluating performance capabilities, and gaining experience in tool operation," says Giang Dao, SEMATECHÕs Director of Lithography. "With the capability provided by the MS-193i, SEMATECH will drive the development of photoresists, immersion fluids and other key infrastructure components for high NA 193nm immersion lithography."
Early work in immersion lithography was conducted in the 1980s, but it remained essentially a curiosity until very recently. Beginning in 2002, SEMATECH began to organise and lead industry efforts to identify and resolve the critical issues in order to realise the potential of immersion lithography. Since then, the industryÕs interest in 193nm immersion lithography has grown rapidly.
"Largely stimulated by the efforts of SEMATECH, the rapid developments made by exposure tool manufacturers and researchers over the past year now appear to make 193nm immersion lithography the preferred technology for manufacturing at the 65nm node," says Malcolm Gower, chairman and technical director of Exitech. "Depending on many developments, including tailoring new immersion fluids with refractive indices higher than water, this technology may be extendable to additional technology nodes."
The Exitech MS-193i is due to be installed at SEMATECH during Q3 2005. The tool incorporates a 1.3 NA catadioptric, 0.4mm field, water immersion imaging objective lens developed by Corning Tropel. With a 4kHz, linearly polarised, 193nm natural bandwidth ArF laser source from Lambda Physik in Germany, the tool is expected to image minimum feature sizes of 70nm and 45nm respectively using binary and phase shifting masks.
In addition to being used for testing immersion resists at the feature sizes eventually needed in production, the MS-193i will also enable early learning on how polarisation, illumination geometries, reticle architectures and fluid defect printability affect imaging in resists with hyper-NA immersion lenses. The tool is also designed to be upgradeable to allow incorporation of even higher NA immersion lenses as advances occur in higher refractive index fluids, lens designs and illumination configurations.
SEMATECH has created the 193nm immersion Technology Center (iTC) as one of the first major programs of its newly established Advanced Materials Research Center (AMRC). The iTC has a total estimated budget of $15mn and will be staffed by SEMATECH technologists who will work over a programme lifetime of two to four years.
