Line width roughness reduction by rational design of photoacid generator for sub-millisecond laser post-exposure bake

摘要

Sub-millisecond laser post-exposure bake (PEB) is an alternative technology to address the excessive acid diffusion for chemically amplified photoresist systems. By rationally designing the resist, laser post-exposure bake is able to improve the resolution and reduce the line width roughness (LWR) compared to patterns exposed under the same conditions but using conventional hotplate PEB. It was found that only the resist with high deprotection activation energy and low diffusion activation energy showed improved performance using laser PEB. Accordingly, a PAG was designed to have low acid diffusivity by binding the counter ions to a molecular glass core while keeping photophysical properties and processing conditions similar to a conventional PAG. By reducing the diffusivity of the counter ions, the PAG was able to further reduce LWR by 60% using laser PEB.