Paper:
A Vertical X-ray Stepper for SOR Lithography
Sunao Ishihara, Atsunobu Une, Munenori Kanai, Masanori Suzuki, Makoto Fukuda and Fujio Omata
LSI Laboratory, Nippon Telegram and Telephone Corporation, 3-1 Morinosato-Wakamiya, Atsugi-shi, Kanagawa 243-01, Japan
A vertical x-ray stepper for SOR lithography has been developed. The stepper exposes wafers in a normal atmosphere to vertically-scanned SOR with continuous alignment control during exposure. The key devices of the stepper are a vertical X-Y stage and an opticalheterodyne alignment system. The X-Y stage uses airlubricated components, including air bearing lead screws, linear sliders and radial/thrust bearings. The optical-heterodyne alignment system detects the displacement between the mask and wafer gratings with precision of 8.3nm. Several exposure experiments proved that the alignment capability is better than ±0.1μm for a 3σ-value.
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