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Buried EUV mask blank defects now detectible |
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Sep 06, 2006 at 02:06 PM |
 Within the European Commission funded research project ‘More Moore' that is looking at a range of EUVL challenges a small team of scientist from Focus GmbH and two German universities, Bielefeld and Mainz have announced that they have been able to identify buried defects as small as 50nm under the multilayer coating of an EUV mask blank.
Advanced TEM/SEM and other inspection techniques have been unable to detect such small defects found below the surface layer prompting work on photoemission electron microscope (PEEM), whose analytical performance is principally superior to current techniques.
"The European funding is an excellent support of our R&D activities and we are pleased that we could achieve such an important result," says Michael Merkel, Managing Director of FOCUS.
The PEEM system has been able to measure features as small as 20nm, importantly without destroying the sample, opening up its use for EUV mask blank inspection work.
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