Luminescent Technologies, a computational metrology and inspection solution provider for the semiconductor manufacturing industry, has reported that its extreme ultraviolet (EUV) defect printability simulator (DPS) software has been adopted for EUVL Infrastructure Development Center (EIDEC)'s EUV mask development program.
EIDEC is an industry consortium concentrating on the development of technologies required to support EUV lithography production. DPS is an ultrafast simulator intended to lower the development time of EUV masks by rapidly and precisely simulating the impact of absorber, contamination, and buried multilayer defects. DPS only takes seconds to perform a multilayer defect simulation with an accuracy compared to that of finite domain time difference technique, which, however, requires weeks of time.
Moreover, DPS features a research and development version of Luminescent Technologies’ multilayer defect compensation algorithm that computes changes to the absorber pattern to offset the effects of flaws in the multilayer stack, a novel method to EUV mask defect mitigation. EUV lithography is the potential substitute for conventional DUV lithography for use in semiconductor patterning. Nevertheless, several key challenges need to be addressed in order to enable EUV lithography as a practical production solution. Lowering EUV mask defects is a major challenge, according to the ITRS roadmap. At present, the industry is years away from zero-defect blanks. Hence, knowing which flaws print and designing methods for reducing or eliminating the effects of these flaws are essential for EUV lithography adoption.
Luminescent Technologies’ Senior Vice President, Linyong (Leo) Pang stated that the company is happy to be selected by EIDEC to offer the software solutions that will speed up the learning curve for understanding and reducing EUV absorber, contamination and buried multilayer defects.
Source: http://www.luminescenttechnologies.com