Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment, as examples. Semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductive layers of material over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various layers using lithography and etch processes to form circuit components and elements thereon.
There is a trend in the semiconductor industry towards reducing the size of features, e.g., the circuits, elements, conductive lines, and vias of semiconductor devices, in order to improve the performance of the semiconductor devices, for example. As feature sizes diminish, the patterning of conductive lines, transistor gates, and other circuit components becomes more challenging. The transfer of patterns of lithography masks to semiconductor devices having small feature sizes may be inaccurate in some applications. Diffraction and other effects in a lithography process or system may cause features formed on semiconductor devices to appear differently than patterns on a lithography mask and differently than the desired patterns.
Thus, what are needed in the art are improved semiconductor devices and methods of manufacturing thereof.