Study on the imaging of bright-field and dark-field for contact holes in extreme ultraviolet lithography considering stage vibration effects

As technology nodes in integrated circuit manufacturing continue to shrink, the impact of wafer and reticle stage vibrations on lithographic imaging quality has become increasingly pronounced. Focusing on extreme ultraviolet lithography for contact hole patterns, this work systematically investigates the influence of stage vibrations on imaging performance with a rigorous lithographic imaging model and numerical simulations. Dynamic stage vibrations are incorporated into a conventional static imaging model to establish a more realistic dynamic imaging framework, and optical proximity correction (OPC) is used to emulate advanced-node process characteristics across different patterns. Results indicate that, as the target feature size decreases, the sensitivity of imaging to vibration increases significantly, and larger vibration amplitudes lead to a clearly nonlinear degradation of imaging quality. A comparative analysis of imaging performance and vibration robustness for different critical dimensions shows that bright-field masks exhibit slightly inferior vibration tolerance, whereas dark-field masks provide superior robustness for dense patterns. Building on these findings, an OPC optimization strategy incorporating moving standard deviation is proposed, offering a feasible approach to mitigating the adverse effects of stage vibrations on lithographic imaging.