Imaging interferometric lithography for arbitrary patterns

Abstract
Conventional optical lithography (OL) is limited by the spatial frequency coverage of the optical system. Inter- ferometric lithography (IL), which approaches the ultimate linear system spatial frequency coverage limit of optics, provides a simple technique to produce periodic patterns at the requisite scale for the next several ULSI generations. Imaging interferometric lithography (IIL), a true integration of optical and interferometric lithography, extends this capability to arbitrary pattern fabrication. Modeling and simulation results show that arbitrary patterns with dense CDs extending to 120-nm at I-line and to 65-nm at a 193-nm exposure wavelength are possible. Initial experiments demonstrate that the coverage in frequency space is increased for a 3-exposure IIl configuration and the resolution is concomitantly increased by a factor of 3. Development of IIL may extend the life of optical lithography to sub-100-nm CD generations.

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