Improved Electron-Beam / DUV Intra-Level Mix-and-Match As A Production Viable Lithography With 100-nm Resolution

The electron(e)-beam / deep ultraviolet (DUV) “intra-level” mix-and-match (ILM&M) strategy proposed by several groups [ 1,2,3] is an attractive concept to increase the throughput of the e-beam direct write (EBDW), while keeping its superior resolution. Nevertheless, in order that the LM&M may play important role in production of leading edge devices in the near future, the throughput and the overlay accuracy must be improved drastically. We propose an improved ILM&M as a production viable lithography featuring a DW biased exposure and a scanning DUV stepper without high-order components of the image field distortion. The proposed ILM&M has been successfully applied to development and early production of leading edge devices in our laboratory.