A Study of Haze Generation as Thin Film Materials

For high quality products in the semiconductor and photomask industries, exposure wavelength has been shortening from i-line to ArF to embody the high resolution as critical dimension (CD) shrinkage and the specifications have been restricted. However, a new defect issue called haze has appeared that is shortening the wavelength. This defect is caused by the photoreaction of chemical residues exposed to SO42-, NH4+ and other chemicals. Accordingly, in this paper we investigated the generation of haze in thin film materials.

For fabrication of various thin films, the materials which were metal, compound material without nitrogen, and compound material with nitrogen, were deposited on a quartz substrate using sputtering. Then, we chemically treated the thin film materials using various conditions including sulfuric peroxide mixture (SPM) and standard cleaning (SC-1).  First, the concentration of ions on the thin film materials was measured using ion chromatography (IC) analysis. Second, haze defects were inspected after exposure in order to evaluate the difference in haze generation on the thin film materials. Also, we investigated the numbers and shape of the occurrences of haze.

 

Author: Ju-Hyun Kang, Han-Sun Cha, Sin-Ju Yang, Chul-Kyu Yang, Jin-Ho Ahn, Kee-Soo Nam, Jong-Min Kim**, Manish Patil, Ik-Bum Hur and Sang-Soo Choi
Date: 2007-02-20
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