Roughness study of a positive tone high performance SCALPEL resist

An important aspect of resist development, for any lithographic technology, is line edge roughness (LER) control. Recent work has been carried out in this field for UV and X-ray resists using atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and modeling but none for resists optimized fro use in the SCALPEL exposure technology. This paper discusses the effect of processing conditions on lin-edge roughness (LER) of positive chemically amplified resists exposed on the SCAPLPEL exposure system using data from both AFM and SEM techniques.