Application of review-SEM to high-resolution inspection for 3xnm nodes

As the pattern size shrinkage, it becomes more important to control the critical size of various pattern shapes at a semiconductor production line. Recently, in a semiconductor process with 20 nm nodes size or less the common optical and even EB inspection tool have considerable limitation to detect critical physical defects. From these backgrounds, we have developed the high-sensitivity fixed point inspection tool based on Review-SEM as the product accomplishment judgment tool for below 10nm size defects on critical size devices. We examined the basic performance of this inspection tool, optimized inspection parameters including beam condition and image processing. Then, the defect detection performance was evaluated using various real advanced memory device containing various critical defects. In this paper, we report these results and show the effectiveness of this inspection tool to the advanced memory devices.