Time-based PEB adjustment for optimizing CD distributions

摘要

In this paper we investigate the impact of bake plate temperature variability throughout the entire bake trajectory on resulting critical dimension. For a poorly-controlled bake plate, it is found that the correlation between the temperature profile and CD distribution is high throughout the entire bake cycle, including the steady state sector. However, for a well-controlled, multiple-zone bake plate, the correlation is only significant during the transient heating sector, since in those cases the steady state plate behavior has already been optimized for CDU performance. An estimate of the potential improvement yet to be gained by improvement of transient heating uniformity is calculated.