The work described in this dissertation has improved three essential components of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography: exposure tools, photoresist, and metrology.

Exposure tools. A field-averaging illumination stage is presented that enables non-uniform, high-coherence sources to be used in applications where highly uniform illumination is required. In an EUV implementation, it is shown that the illuminator achieves a 6.5% peak-to-valley intensity variation across the entire design field of view. In addition, a design for a stand-alone EUV printing tool capable of delivering 15 nm half-pitch sinusoidal fringes with available sources, gratings and nano-positioning stages is presented. It is shown that the proposed design delivers a near zero line-edge-rougness (LER) aerial image, something extremely attractive for the application of resist testing.

Photoresist. Two new methods of quantifying the deprotection blur of EUV photoresists are described and experimentally demonstrated. The deprotection blur, LER, and sensitivity parameters of several EUV photoresists are quantified simultaneously as base weight percent, photoacid generator (PAG) weight percent, and post-exposure bake (PEB) temperature are varied. Two surprising results are found: (1) changing base weight percent does not significantly affect the deprotection blur of EUV photoresist, and (2) increasing PAG weight percent can simultaneously reduce LER and E-size in EUV photoresist. The latter result motivates the development of an EUV exposure statistics model that includes the effects of photon shot noise, the PAG spatial distribution, and the changing of the PAG distribution during the exposure. In addition, a shot noise + deprotection blur model is used to show that as deprotection blur becomes large relative to the size of the printed feature, LER reduction from improved counting statistics becomes dominated by an increase in LER due to reduced deprotection contrast.

Metrology. Finally, this dissertation describes MOSAIC, a new wavefront metrology that enables complete wavefront recovery from print or aerial image based measurements. This new technique, based on measuring the local focal length of the optic at sampled positions in the pupil, recovers the curvature of the aberration and uses the curvature to recover the aberration itself. In a modeled EUV implementation, MOSAIC is shown to recover the SEMATECH Berkeley MET wavefront with a 4.2% RMS error: a 4× improvement over the reported errors of the original lateral shearing interferometry wavefront measurement.