Haze Defects Reduce The Photomask Cleaning Technology For The New Technology

A novel mask cleaning technology in which both 172nm DUV illumination and Ozone (O3) water flush are introduced is presented in this paper. To further optimize the mask clean performance, the cleaning process parameters, hardware configuration, and routine maintenance are improved. Based on these improvements, the mask haze issue has been effectively solved, the cycle time of haze repeat was extent from 3 month to 12 months, and the phase decay of each cleaning has been control to be less than 1. The clean yield can reach 97.2% and the mask yield can reach 99.9%.In the 1st chapter of the paper, introduced the trend of semiconductor and mask manufacture technology, traditional mask manufacture and cleaning technology. In the 2nd charter, I analyzed the root cause of haze growing on the mask which induced clean yield loss. In the 3rd and 4th charter, I detail explained how to solve the haze growing by new mask cleaning technology, and improve this new cleaning technology by setting recipe parameter. In the 5th charter, it described the method of improving equipment operation and maintain to increasing mask clean yield. The last charter summarized this paper.