<title>CD uniformity of photomasks written with high-voltage variable-shaped e beam</title>

The critical dimension uniformity required in the fabrication of photomasks for 1 gigabit DRAMs will be more stringent that 20 nm in terms of 3 sigma. High-voltage variable-shaped e-beam (VSB) writing is advantageous because of its high resolution, linewidth stability, and throughput performance. However, stitching errors in VSB writing have been a critical problem in the fabrication of advanced photomasks. In this paper, an improved method to calibrate the size of a VSB shot and reduce shot stitching errors is proposed. The accuracy of the calibration method depends on that of the linewidth measurement system, and shot-size calibration with an accuracy of +/- 10 nm can be achieved using existing measurement systems. The positioning accuracy of VSB shots was enhanced by a multiple pass exposure scheme. With these procedures applied to a 50 kV VSB system, the linewidth variation of a photomask in a local area such as a square region of 200 micrometers X 200 micrometers was reduced to less than 20 nm.© (1996) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.