New alignment mark design structures for higher diffraction order wafer quality enhancement

摘要

ASML AH53 and AH74 with higher odd-order diffraction light are the widely used alignment marks in industry to achieve better alignment accuracy by reducing mark damage noise. During lithography alignment process, decent diffraction light power is the basic demand. However, with the use of some high absorption (k is not equal to 0 for detective wavelength) material, it is difficult to detect the light power reflecting from the thick and opaque film stacks with these standard alignment marks. Here we optimized four alignment marks with higher odd-order diffraction power with comparing with AH53 and AH74. One software based on Fourier optical theory is built to quickly calculate the wafer quality (WQ) of different film stacks and different alignment marks. ASML SMASH alignment system can accept customized alignment mark, with new mark type configuration file. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of new alignment marks, we put the marks on a mask and do the experiments to compare with simulation results. All the experiments results show that new designed alignment marks have larger WQs of odd-order diffraction.