by Jan Willis, eBeam Initiative

October 5, 2011 - The eBeam Initiative held its second annual BACUS event on Tuesday, September 20, to continue to promote greater education and focus on eBeam technologies. Five new members were welcomed to the eBeam Initiative (Applied Materials, IMS Chips, Mentor Graphics, Multibeam, and SoftJin Technologies) bringing the total number of company members to 37.

Kicking off the event was a preview of what would later be named the Best Poster in the session immediately after the event. Dr. Gek Soon Chua of GlobalFoundries presented 20nm results using model-based mask data preparation (MB-MDP) from D2S, co-author of the paper. Their conclusion, backed up with PV Band, mask error enhancement factor (MEEF), depth of focus (DOF) and Via area analysis, was that by using overlapping shots, GlobalFoundries can mimic the ideal OPC data/mask shape to realize lithography performance and at the same time achieve significant shot count reduction. It's like having your cake and eating it, too.

Another presentation by AMTC's Christian Bürgel dealt with EUV masks. He reported that sub-20nm masks are significantly affected by short-range effects for both ArF and EUV masks, and by mid-range effects for EUV masks. Further, these effects cannot be corrected real-time in the eBeam writers. He concluded that there is a need to adopt new eBeam simulation approaches such as MB-MDP to enable dose modulation to correct the exposure effects.

A panel discussion wrapped up the event with Naoya Hayashi from DNP and Franklin Kalk from Toppan Photomasks joining the discussion. An area of agreement was that for EUV masks, the industry is still discovering effects that will need to be dealt with, but that progress is indeed happening. Meanwhile, 193i lithography continues to be nurtured and innovations applied to manage mask-writing times to reasonable levels while meeting more challenging wafer quality requirements. And as was the case at last year's event, the audience was vocal about the lack of current funding to really ensure the success of the variety of eBeam technologies to support EUV, 193i, nanoimprint, and maskless.

Presentations from the event and videos with each of the panelists are available at www.ebeam.org.

Jan Willis is facilitator at the eBeam Initiative. Email: jan@williscalibra.com.