New overlay pattern design for real-time focus and tilt monitor

The reduced depth of focus (DOF) caused by higher numerical aperture (NA) is making the accuracy of best focus measurement increasingly important. A new overlay pattern is developed herein to precisely measure the best focus of lithographic tools. Specially designed 'bar-in-bar' (BIB) was employed to obtain the best focus by using the opposite shifting direction of inner and outer bars when defocused. The inner and outer bars are composed of various pattern sizes. When defocused, the shrinkage of the smaller patterns is more significant than that of the larger patterns, thus causing the center of gravity to shift. The distribution and pattern sizes are optimized to obtain high reproducibility and sensitive position shifting for various defocus conditions. Employing the special BIB pattern, the best focus, tilting and field curvature can be easily measured via the conventional overlay measurement tool. By adding the special BIB to the scribe lanes of the production wafers, the best focus and tilting of the stepper can be obtained when measuring a layer-to- layer overlay shift, and can then be fed back to the stepper as a reference for following processing wafers.