EUVL mask blank repair

EUV mask blanks are fabricated by depositing a reflective Mo/Si multilayer film onto super-polished substrates. Small defects in this thin film coating can significantly alter the reflected field and introduce defects in the printed image. Ideally one would want to produce defect-free mask blanks; however, this may be very difficult to achieve in practice. One practical way to increase the yield of mask blanks is to effectively repair multilayer defects, and to this effect we present two complementary defect repair strategies for use on multilayer-coated EUVL mask blanks. A defect is any area on the mask which causes unwanted variations in EUV dose in the aerial image obtained in a printing tool, and defect repair is correspondingly defined as any strategy that renders a defect unprintable during exposure. The term defect mitigation can be adopted to describe any strategy which renders a critical defect non-critical when printed, and in this regard a non-critical defect is one that does not adversely affect device function. Defects in the patterned absorber layer consist of regions where metal, typically chrome, is unintentionally added or removed from the pattern leading to errors in the reflected field. There currently exists a mature technology based on ion beam milling and ion beam assisted deposition for repairing defects in the absorber layer of transmission lithography masks, and it is reasonable to expect that these this technology will be extended to the repair of absorber defects in EUVL masks'. However, techniques designed for the repair of absorber layers can not be directly applied to the repair of defects in the mask blank, and in particular the multilayer film. In this paper we present for the first time a new technique for the repair of amplitude defects as well as recent results on the repair of phase defects.