Kinetic simulation of an extreme ultraviolet radiation driven plasma near a multilayer mirror

Abstract

Future generation lithography tools will use extreme ultraviolet radiation to enable the printing of sub-50 nanometer features on silicon wafers. The extreme ultraviolet radiation, coming from a pulsed discharge, photoionizes the low pressure background gas in the tool. A weakly ionized plasma is formed, which will be in contact with the optical components of the lithography device. In the plasma sheath region ions will be accelerated towards the surfaces of multilayermirrors. A self-consistent kinetic particle-in-cell model has been applied to describe a radiation driven plasma. The simulations predict the plasma parameters and notably the energy at which ions impact on the plasma boundaries. We have studied the influence of photoelectron emission from the mirror on the sheath dynamics and on the ion impact energy. Furthermore, the ion impact energy distribution has been convoluted with the formula of Yamamura and Tawara [At. Data Nucl. Data Tables62, 149 (1996)] for the sputter yield to obtain the rate of physical sputtering. The model predicts that the sputter rate is dominated by the presence of doubly ionized argon ions.