Vacuum induced photoresist outgassing

In order to continue the trend toward smaller feature sizes in lithography, new methods of lithography will be needed. A likely method for printing features 32 nm and smaller is extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. EUV allows for features to be printed that are smaller than the current methods can achieve. However, outgassing of the photoresist is a concern for EUV lithography. The outgassed components can lead to contamination of the optics, degrading the reflectivity and hence lowering throughput of the exposure tools. Outgassing due to EUV exposure has been investigated by many groups. However, there were no complete investigations available of vacuum induced outgassing. In this paper, several methods were employed to investigate the outgassing due to vacuum. It was found that the vacuum induced outgassing outgassed a similar number of molecules as the outgassing due to EUV exposure. Furthermore, almost all of the outgassing was completed after about two minutes in vacuum. To mitigate the potential concern of outgassing due to vacuum causing contamination of optics, this work shows that photoresist coated silicon wafers only require about two minutes of pumping prior to insertion near the optics within EUV lithography tools.