Resist Science and Kinetics

Significant advances are continually being made in semiconductor device fabrication, especially in lithography. A key step in the lithography involves the definition of a circuit pattern into a resist. The economical operation of semiconductor device fabrication demands extremely high resist sensitivity. For the achievement of high sensitivity, the concept of chemical amplification is an indispensable technology. Nowadays the trade-off between sensitivity, resolution, and line edge roughness is the most serious concern for the development of high performance resists based on chemical amplification. In the present paper, we reconsider the history of the resist development and discuss the critical points and the new design of high permeance resist materials and processes from the viewpoint of resist science and kinetics such as the trade-off and non-trade-off factors and the limitation of chemically amplified resists.