Computational study of line tip printability of sub-20-nm technology

This paper illustrates the increasing importance of line tip printing as measured by the size of the weak line tip zone for sub-20nm technology. This paper suggests adding line tip printability into sub-20nm lithography performance metric in addition to the conventional tip-to-tip resolution. This study shows that these two metrics sometimes respond to lithography conditions inversely. The importance of including line tip printability into technology evaluation is demonstrated by comparing LELE optical lithography and EUV lithography. Also, line tip printing with EUV lithography is explored with various illumination conditions and resist developer tones.