In-situ monitoring and control of photoresist parameters during thermal processing in the lithography sequence

Abstract

The rapid transition to smaller microelectronic feature sizes involves the introduction of new lithography technologies, new photoresist materials, and tighter processes specifications. This transition has become increasingly difficult and costly. The application of advanced computational and control methodologies have seen increasing utilization in recent years to improve yields, throughput, and, in some cases, to enable the actual process to print smaller devices. In this work, we demonstrate recent advances in real-time monitoring and control of these photoresist parameters with the use of innovative technologies, control and signal processing techniques; and integrated metrology to improve the performance of the various photoresist processing steps in the lithography sequence. © 2009 Copyright SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering.