Direct aerial image monitoring for extreme ultraviolet lithography systems

An aerial image monitor (AIM) for operation in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) is constructed to characterize the performance of a prototype EUV projection lithography system (10X-I at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA). The AIM is also used to rapidly align the optical system and to find the plane of best focus.;Two patterning techniques are developed for EUV AIM aperture fabrication using electron-beam lithography. The fabrication of the final artifacts uses focused ion beam lithography and thermal evaporation to produce aperture slits with widths less than 100nm that are used for AIM as well as two other interferometry experiments carried out in the EUV.;AIM is used to quantify EUV lithographic system vibration which is reduced from an initial value of 350nm to 17;Three distinct methods of aerial image monitoring are implemented on the 10X-I EUVL system. The first scans a knife-edge at the image plane across the aerial image of a 2.5;The final set of image monitoring experiments is a depth of focus study that involves scanning a single narrow slit artifact across the aerial image of 0.5...