Accelerating high-NA introduction with RET innovations

The introduction of Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) scanners into high-volume manufacturing of semiconductor chips required, and enabled, the development of the ecosystem around it: from EUV mask-making to new resist materials, and the corresponding Resolution-Enhancement Techniques (RET) to leverage the new developments. As the industry moves to adopt the new High-Numerical Aperture (High-NA) EUV scanners from ASML, being able to extrapolate the learnings on low-NA EUV to High-NA is critical to speeding-up the adoption of High-NA scanners. This paper discusses various RET capabilities and methodologies that were essential to having production-quality reticles available as soon as the tool was ready.