Line Edge Roughness in Chemically Amplified Resist: Speculation, Simulation and Application

Computer simulations and direct measurements were carried out to explore the effect of adding base quencher on the line edge roughness (LER) of photoresist images. The effect of variation of the polymer sequence distribution and hydrophilic units was also studied. The variation of surface roughness at different developed film thicknesses was measured by atomic force microscopy (AFM) for each polymer. It was concluded that the variation of dissolution rate (DR) and the distribution of acid and base are important parameters that must be considered in order to solve the LER problem for future lithography generation.