Aberration compensation in charged particle projection lithography

Projection systems offer the opportunity to increase the throughput for charged particle lithography, because such systems image a large area of a mask directly on to a wafer as a single shot. Shots have to be imaged over a certain range of off-axis distances at the wafer to increase the writing speed, because shot sizes are limited to about 0.25×0.25 mm2 due to aberrations. In a projection system with only lenses, however, the aberrations for off-axis shots are still very large, and some aberration compensation elements need to be introduced. In this paper, three aberration compensation elements (deflectors, stigmators and dynamic focus lenses) are first discussed, a suite of newly developed software, called PROJECTION, based on this principle and our unified aberration theory [2,3] is then described, and an illustrative example computed with the software is finally given.