Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

An error propagation stochastic model is described and used to study the impact of both photon and photoresist material sources of line-width roughness (LWR). Based on typical chemically amplified resist parameters, material sources of LWR are shown to be of equal importance to photon sources. Of the material sources, quencher is shown to be the most important input noise term. The results show that it is not the relative quencher noise that ultimately matters but rather the absolute quencher noise relative to the mean produced acid count. The results also show that chemical yield is critical and that benefiting from increased absorptivity also requires the chemical yield to be maintained.