Efficient simulation of postexposure bake processes in STORM

An efficient software tool, STORM, is described for simulating 2D line-edge profiles and line-end shortening in chemically-amplified resist (CARs). The most difficult aspect of modeling CARs is emulating the amplification reaction and reaction state dependent transport. The difficulty arises primarily out of the nonlinearity associated with the behavior of diffusion with reacted materials state. These phenomena have important impacts in horizontal and vertical cross section profiles of post- exposure baked resists. They also impact line-ends which are three dimensional but may be approximated using the two horizontal dimensions.