Challenges and opportunities in applying grapho-epitaxy DSA lithography to metal cut and contact/via applications

摘要

Directed self assembly has become a very attractive technology for Fin and contact/via applications. Some of the issues related to pattern placement error, defectivity rates and process integration are actively being addressed by the industry and have not faced significant roadblocks for contact-hole applications. While many DSA applications have been proposed, deploying DSA for Fin structures competes in cost and variability control with SADP techniques. Given the 1D nature of find structures, it is difficult to control fin placement with accuracy better than 4nm 3 sigma. In addition, a second patterning step is needed to remove the un-wanted sections of the grating and leaving behind only the required fin structures, therefore limiting its adoption. On the other hand, DSA applied to contact/via holes has demonstrated low defectivity rates due to improved polymerization and processing techniques, as well as an adequate control to reduce the placement error due to thermal fluctuations during the annealing and cylinder formation process. For that reason, the results from contact/via layers can extend to the metal cut layer printing with DSA grapho-epitaxy. In this paper, we show that DSA provides a promising cost-effective solution for the technolgy scaling by reducing mask number from N to N-1. It is shown that pxOPC may provide better guiding patterns than the conventional one. In addition, the practical grouping rules for DSA should avoid 2D grouping, avoid putting more than 3 features in a group with different pitches, and avoid grouping features with different sizes. Our recommendations to designers for DSA technology are the following: if the design is to be decomposed with 2 or more DSA masks, then the design rules should be set up in this way: first the minimum pitch is better to be on DSA material's own natural pitch; second, for each DSA mask, singletons and bar-like grouping shapes with DSA's natural pitch should be used as much as possible.