Study on RLS trade-off resist upgrade for production ready EUV lithography

Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) is the most promising technology as substitute for multiple patterning based on ArF immersion lithography. If enough productivity can be accomplished, EUV will take main role in the chip manufacturing. Since the introduction of NXE3300, many significant results have been achieved in source power and availability, but lots of improvements are still required in various aspects for the implementation of EUV lithography on high volume manufacturing. Among them, it is especially important to attain high sensitivity resist without degrading other resolution performance. In this paper, performances of various resists were evaluated with real device patterns on NXE3300 scanner and technical progress of up-to-date EUV resists will be shown by comparing with the performance of their predecessors. Finally the prospect of overcoming the triangular trade-off between sensitivity, resolution, line edge roughness (LER) and achieving high volume manufacturing will be discussed.