title: Aberration measurement of projection optics in lithographic tools by use of an alternating phase-shifting mask.
abstract: As a critical dimension shrinks, the degradation in image quality caused by wavefront aberrations of projection optics in lithographic tools becomes a serious problem. It is necessary to establish a technique for a fast and accurate in situ aberration measurement. We introduce what we believe to be a novel technique for characterizing the aberrations of projection optics by using an alternating phase-shifting mask. The even aberrations, such as spherical aberration and astigmatism, and the odd aberrations, such as coma, are extracted from focus shifts and image displacements of the phase-shifted pattern, respectively. The focus shifts and the image displacements are measured by a transmission image sensor. The simulation results show that, compared with the accuracy of the previous straightforward measurement technique, the accuracy of the coma measurement increases by more than 30% and the accuracy of the spherical-aberration measurement increases by approximately 20%.
authors.affiliation: Information Optics Laboratory, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201800, China. wf@ustc.edu
authors.forename: Fan
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Xiangzhao
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Mingying
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.forename: Dongqing
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Weijie
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.forename: Jianming
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hu