Premium
Proximity printing of chrome masks
Author(s) -
Meyerhofer Dietrich,
Mitchell Joe
Publication year - 1983
Publication title -
polymer engineering and science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.503
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1548-2634
pISSN - 0032-3888
DOI - 10.1002/pen.760231803
Subject(s) - resist , materials science , reticle , fabrication , photoresist , proximity effect (electron beam lithography) , optics , micrometer , photolithography , photomask , aerial image , critical dimension , lithography , optoelectronics , nanotechnology , image (mathematics) , wafer , computer science , physics , electron beam lithography , medicine , alternative medicine , layer (electronics) , pathology , artificial intelligence
We have investigated the application of proximity printing to the copying of chrome masks used for integrated circuit fabrication. The mask blanks were coated with various positive and negative photoresists. When plotting the difference in width between etched lines on the print and the corresponding feature on the mask as a function of the separation, one observes fluctuations due to the movement of the diffraction peaks in the optical image. For the negative resist, the averaged difference in width is approximately constant to separations of 25 micrometer (μm), while for positive resists it changes monotonically with increasing gap spacing. The measured results are compared with calculations using a model of the resist exposure and development and good agreement is obtained. On the basis of these results we conclude that proximity printing would be difficult to apply to mask replication, but that it has considerable promise for replicating 10X step‐and‐repeat reticles.