Nanotech

Defect-Free Mask Blanks Next EUV Challenge
By Pete Singer
The next major roadblock to progress in the ongoing push to develop EUV lithography for volume production is the availability of defect-free mask blanks. According to Veeco’s Tim Pratt, Senior Director, Marketing, the tools in place today are not capable of producing mask blanks with the kind of yield necessary to support a ramp in EUV. “Based on the yield today, the mask blank manufacturing capacity can’t produce enough mask blanks to support the ASML scanners that they’re planning to ship,” Pratt said. “ASML is going to be delivering some light source upgrades in the field and when those start happening, the effective total wafer throughput of EUV scanners in the field is going to multiply and there’s just not the supply of usable mask blanks to be able to support those.”
The requirement for 2015 is to have zero blank defects larger than 62nm. SEMATECH in 2012 reported work showing eight defects larger than 50nm. “A lot of progress being made but the elusive zero defectshas not yet been hit,” Pratt said. Veeco, which is the sole supplier of EUV multilayer deposition tools, has plans to upgrade the existing Odyssey tool and launch a new platform in the 2017/2018 timeframe.

Figure 1 shows an EUV mask, which is considerably more complicated than conventional photomasks. The EUV mask begins with a substrate. On the back of the substrate you have some material that’s used for chucking (an electrostatic chuck is used to hold the mask to a stage in the ASML tool and in the Veeco ion beam deposition tool). On top of the substrate is a multilayer sandwich made up of 40-50 moly silicon pairs that creates a mirror. A ruthenium capping layer helps protect the mask. The top layer is an absorber, and that’s what gets patterned.
The photo at the bottom right of Fig. 1 shows a small pit on the substrate. “As the multilayer gets deposited on top of it, you take what in the beginning might have been a small pit and...