Performance of Polarized Illuminators in Hyper NA Lithography Tools

Polarized light illumination is essential for hyper-NA imaging such as immersion lithography. This is confirmed by comparison of optical images between unpolarized light illumination condition and polarized light illumination condition. In this paper, we introduce our polarized light illumination apparatus and some experimental results, which confirm the effect of improvement of the imaging performance by utilization of polarized light illumination. In addition, required quality of the polarized light illumination for hyper NA lithography is discussed