We studied the erosion and feature stability of fused silica patterns under different template cleaning conditions. The conventional sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide mixture (SPM) cleaning is compared with an advanced nonacid process. Spectroscopic ellipsometry optical critical dimension measurements were used to characterize the changes in pattern profile with good sensitivity. This study confirmed the erosion of the silica patterns in the traditional acid-based SPM cleaning mixture (H 2 SO 4 +H 2 O 2 ) at a rate of ∼0.1 nm per cleaning cycle. However, the advanced nonacid cleaning process only showed critical dimension shift of ∼0.01 nm per cleaning. Contamination removal and pattern integrity of sensitive 20-nm features under MegaSonic assisted cleaning was also demonstrated.
We studied the erosion and feature stability of fused silica patterns under different template cleaning conditions. The
conventional SPM cleaning is compared with an advanced non-acid process. Spectroscopic ellipsometry optical
critical dimension (SE-OCD) measurements were used to characterize the changes in pattern profile with good
sensitivity. This study confirmed the erosion of the silica patterns in the traditional acid-based SPM cleaning mixture
(H2SO4+H2O2) at a rate of ~0.1nm per cleaning cycle. The advanced non-acid clean process however only showed
CD shift of ~0.01nm per clean. Contamination removal & pattern integrity of sensitive 20nm features under
MegaSonic assisted cleaning is also demonstrated.
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