Lithographic performance of ZEP520A and mr-PosEBR resists exposed by electron beam and extreme ultraviolet lithography

TL;DR

This study evaluates the lithographic performance of ZEP520A and mr-PosEBR resists under electron beam and EUV lithography, demonstrating their high resolution, fast response, and potential for large-area nanostructure fabrication.

Contribution

It validates the extendibility of ZEP520A and mr-PosEBR resists from EBL to EUV lithography with comparable quality and efficiency.

Findings

Both resists are highly responsive to EUV with doses below 12 mJ/cm2.

They achieve 25 nm half-pitch resolution in dense line/space patterns.

Pattern quality and sidewall roughness are maintained at high standards.

Abstract

Pattern transfer by deep anisotropic etch is a well-established technique for fabrication of nanoscale devices and structures. For this technique to be effective, the resist material plays a key role and must have high resolution, reasonable sensitivity and high etch selectivity against the conventional silicon substrate or underlayer film. In this work, the lithographic performance of two high etch resistance materials was evaluated: ZEP520A (Nippon Zeon Co.) and mr-PosEBR (micro resist technology GmbH). Both materials are positive tone, polymer-based and non-chemically amplified resists. Two exposure techniques were used: electron beam lithography (EBL) and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. These resists were originally designed for EBL patterning, where high quality patterning at sub-100 nm resolution was previously demonstrated. In the scope of this work, we also aim to validate their extendibility to EUV for high resolution and large area patterning. To this purpose, the same EBL process conditions were employed at EUV. The figures of merit, i.e. dose to clear, dose to size, and resolution, were extracted and these results are discussed systematically. It was found that both materials are very fast at EUV (dose to clear lower than 12 mJ/cm2) and are capable of resolving dense lines/space arrays with a resolution of 25 nm half-pitch. The quality of patterns was also very good and the sidewall roughness was below 6 nm. Interestingly, the general-purpose process used for EBL can be extended straightforwardly to EUV lithography with comparable high quality and yield. Our findings open new possibilities for lithographers who wish to devise novel fabrication schemes exploiting EUV for fabrication of nanostructures by deep etch pattern transfer.