Novel monitoring of EUV litho cluster for manufacturing insertion

Sustaining optimum EUV litho-cluster performance requires monitoring the dimensional variance of representative patterns at high speed and sampling density. We present NXE3400 monitoring results obtained with an optical technique whose amplified sensitivity to dimensional variance increases with decreasing pitch. The scalable technique enables quantitative tracking of site-to-site pattern profile and fidelity and it is applied here on 5nm-node-relevant EUV dense features (line/space width, line/space ends in elongated contact holes). We benchmark against conventional monitoring methods to demonstrate capability improvements. We finally introduce complementary methods which enable a robust manufacturing insertion of EUV technology; such as 2-dimensional feature monitoring and stochastic defect prediction.