Clean and stable LPP light source for HVM inspection applications

At the Laboratory for Energy Conversion, ETH Zurich a new tin droplet-based laser-produced plasma source with application in EUV lithography is operational since Q3 2013. The EUV source ALPS II is equipped with a large capacity droplet dispenser and a high power (kW), high repetition rate (>6 kHz) Nd:YAG laser. The new source should address the requirements of high volume manufacturing for different inspection and metrology applications found in EUV lithography. The average source brightness is equal to 350 W/mm2sr. Individual droplet tracking in time and space, which is coupled to a droplet positioning and triggering system helps to increase the pulse-to-pulse EUV emission stability of the source. The lateral droplet stability is on the order of 10-15% of the droplet diameter. The individual droplet triggering yields deviations between the laser trigger and the droplet passage time at the irradiation site of less than 1 us, even for large droplet timing fluctuations (>5%). The in-band EUV radiation is measured with an energy monitor, which is coupled to a fast analog hardware-based integrator. The pulse-to-pulse EUV energy stability for high stability data equals 3% (σ). In the case of window-averaged (0.1 s) data, the EUV stability equals 0.86% (σ). Low stability data is also reported. The large brightness of the presented LPP-based light source can be tuned to adjust the EUV light stability that is required by the inspection tool.