Modeling of line roughness and its impact on the diffraction intensities and the reconstructed critical dimensions in scatterometry

Abstract

We investigate the impact of line edge and line width roughness (LER, LWR) on the measured diffraction intensities in angular resolved extreme ultraviolet (EUV) scatterometry for a periodic line-space structure designed for EUV lithography. LER and LWR with typical amplitudes of a few nanometers were previously neglected in the course of the profile reconstruction. The 2D rigorous numerical simulations of the diffraction process for periodic structures are carried out with the finite element method (FEM) providing a numerical solution of the two-dimensional Helmholtz equation. To model roughness, multiple calculations are performed for domains with large periods, containing many pairs of line and space with stochastically chosen line and space widths. A systematic decrease of the mean efficiencies for higher diffraction orders along with increasing variances is observed and established for different degrees of roughness. ...