Performance Demonstration of Significant Availability Improvement in Lithography Light Sources using GLX~(TM) Control System

摘要

Increasing productivity demands on leading-edge scanners require greatly improved light source availability. This translates directly to minimizing downtime and maximizing productive time, as defined in the SEMI E10 standard. Focused efforts to achieve these goals are ongoing and Cymer has demonstrated significant improvements on production light sources. This paper describes significant availability improvements of Cymer light sources enabled by a new advanced gas management scheme called Gas Lifetime extension? (GLX(TM)) control system. Using GLX, we have demonstrated the capability of extending the pulse-based interval between full gas replenishments to 1 billion pulses on our XLA light sources, as well as significant extension in the time-based interval between refills. This represents a factor of 10X increase in the maximum interval between full gas replenishments, which equates to potential gain of up to 2% in productive time over a year for systems operating at high utilization. In this paper, we provide performance data on extended (1 billion pulse) laser operation without full gas replenishment under multiple actual practical production environments demonstrating the ability to achieve long gas lives with very stable optical performance from the laser system. In particular, we have demonstrated that GLX can provide excellent stability in key optical performance parameters, such as bandwidth, over extended gas lives. Further, these stability benefits can be realized under both high and low pulse accumulation scenarios. In addition, we briefly discuss the potential for future gas management enhancements that will provide even longer term system performance stability and corresponding reductions in tool downtime.