High aspect ratio tungsten grating on ultrathin Si membranes for extreme UV lithography.

Extreme ultraviolet lithography is one of the modern lithography tools for high-volume manufacturing with 22 nm resolution and beyond. But critical challenges exist to the design and fabrication of large-scale and highly efficient diffraction transmission gratings, significantly reducing the feature sizes down to 22 nm and beyond. To achieve such a grating, the surface flatness, the line edge roughness, the transmission efficiency and aspect ratio should be improved significantly. Delachat et al (2015 Nanotechnology 26 108262) develop a full process to fabricate a tungsten diffraction grating on an ultrathin silicon membrane with higher aspect ratio up to 8.75 that met all the aforementioned requirements for extreme ultraviolet lithography. This process is fully compatible with standard industrial extreme ultraviolet lithography.