Probing buried structures in Inorganic-organic hybrid resists with energy-tunable X-rays (Conference Presentation)

With the adoption of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography across the semiconductor industry, there comes a need to develop new resist materials that will become the mainstay enabling technology. This development places pressure on the metrology community to develop adequate non-destructive techniques capable of measuring the sub-10 nm patterns that such resists are meant to produce. Recent progress in grazing incidence and resonant x-ray scattering techniques [1-3] have shown particular promise at being able to address part of these characterization challenges. In this paper, we highlight the potential for various techniques which use energy-tunable x-rays to probe buried structures critical to progress in EUVL. We show how resonant contrast can harness spatially distributed chemical heterogeneities within a resist in order to probe buried structures in a variety of photoresists containing key inorganic components. Specifically, by focusing on inorganic/organic hybrid resists, we demonstrate the potential insights from and correlation between contrast acquired at different elemental absorption edges and chemistries from a given resist.