Plasma sources for EUV lithography exposure tools

TLDR

EUV lithography demands high‑throughput, cost‑effective tools operating at 13–14 nm, requiring a shift from conventional lamps and lasers to high‑temperature plasmas and reflective optics to meet stringent power, stability, and repeatability requirements. The study aims to define and optimize EUV source specifications—including wavelength, power, hot‑spot size, collection angle, repetition rate, pulse‑to‑pulse repeatability, and debris‑induced component lifetime—to meet customer requirements. The authors derive source specifications from customer demands for throughput, cost of ownership, and imaging quality, guiding the design of the EUV source.

Abstract

The source is an integral part of an extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) tool. Such a source, as well as the EUVL tool, has to fulfil extremely high demands both technical and cost oriented. The EUVL tool operates at a wavelength in the range 13–14 nm, which requires a major re-thinking of state-of-the-art lithography systems operating in the DUV range. The light production mechanism changes from conventional lamps and lasers to relatively high temperature emitting plasmas. The light transport, mainly refractive for DUV, should become reflective for EUV. The source specifications are derived from the customer requirements for the complete tool, which are: throughput, cost of ownership (CoO) and imaging quality. The EUVL system is considered as a follow up of the existing DUV based lithography technology and, while improving the feature resolution, it has to maintain high wafer throughput performance, which is driven by the overall CoO picture. This in turn puts quite high requirements on the collectable in-band power produced by an EUV source. Increased, due to improved feature resolution, critical dimension (CD) control requirements, together with reflective optics restrictions, necessitate pulse-to-pulse repeatability, spatial stability control and repetition rates, which are substantially better than those of current optical systems. All together the following aspects of the source specification will be addressed: the operating wavelength, the EUV power, the hot spot size, the collectable angle, the repetition rate, the pulse-to-pulse repeatability and the debris induced lifetime of components.