2008-02-25

A New Robust Process Window Qualification (PWQ) Technique to Perform Systematic Defect Characterization to Enlarge the Lithographic Process Window, using a Die-to-Database Verification Tool (NGR2100)

• SPIE 2008
• Tadashi Kitamura*, Toshiaki Hasebe*, Kazufumi Kubota*, Futoshi Sakai*, Shinichi Nakazawa*, Michael J. Hoffman,* Masahiro Yamamoto*, Masahiro Inoue**
• *NGR Inc., Tokyo, Japan 174-0051
• **Topcon Corp., Tokyo, Japan 174-8580

A new Robust Process Window Qualification (PWQ) Technique to perform systematic defect characterization to enlarge the Lithographic process window is described, using a Die-to-Database Verification Tool (NGR2100).

The continued scaling of semiconductor device’s, is driving the need for progressively more aggressive optical proximity correction (OPC). As the number of OPC features increase, modeling techniques are stressed, resulting in increasing numbers of systematic defects. New advanced methods of identifying and characterizing these systematic defects are required.