Edge Treatment Important for Hard Masks

摘要

Hard masks are becoming more commonplace in today's fabs because of the use of thinner photoresist for advanced lithography and the need to maintain etch selectivity. A new process was designed to specifically deliver organic chemical vapor deposition (CVD) hard masks for front-end applications. One of the differentiating features of the system is an additional edge bead removal (EBR) process to reduce particle defects and improve die-edge yield. "That's the key reason we are seeing improved yield during customer demos," said Julian Hsieh, senior director of product management for the dielectrics business group at Novellus Systems (San Jose). Novellus offers the ash-able hard mask on the Vector Express plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) platform, which was introduced in March of this year.