1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the manufacture of semiconductor devices. More particularly, the present invention is directed to novel processes for use of germanium as an antireflective coating in active area and gate lithography steps.
2. The Relevant Technology
The need for increased miniaturization in integrated circuit semiconductor devices is well known. As feature sizes decrease, the need for more precise control of photolithography, often a limiting process, becomes acute. Better control of the line width produced by photolithography enables more aggressive circuit design for faster, higher performance circuits.
The line width produced by a photolithography process varies with many factors, including the amount of energy absorbed by the photoresist during exposure. For example, with positive photoresists, increased exposure energy decreases line width while decreased exposure energy increases line width. Precise control of line width thus requires precise control of exposure energies.
Control of exposure energy can be complicated by the varying reflectivity of the layers immediately below the photoresist. Photoresist over high reflectivity areas will be overexposed compared to photoresist over low reflectivity areas.
Nitride layers in particular vary significantly in reflectivity with varying thickness. The reflectivity of a nitride layer varies periodically with its thickness. At a minimum or maximum in the reflectivity fiction, reflectivity changes only slowly for every unit change of nitride thickness. Under current processing techniques, to avoid significant variation in exposure energy over the surface of a wafer, deposited nitride layer thickness is carefully controlled over the entire wafer surface to be as near as possible to a minimum or maximum of the periodic reflectivity function. But precise thickness control of nitride growth is difficult, particularly at the relatively thick 2000 Angstroms thickness that is employed in a typical active area stack, in which the required tolerance is approximately only .+-.50 Angstroms. Antireflective coatings (ARCs) can substantially reduce the reflected energy during photolithography, reducing the need for critical control of the thickness of underlying layers.
ARCs can also assist in avoiding standing waves in the photoresist during exposure. The presence of standing waves in the photoresist are problematic in that the reflected waves cause interference with the incoming wave and cause the intensity of the light to vary periodically in a direction normal to the photoresist. Standing waves cause variations in the development rate along edges of the photoresist, and degrade the image resolution. Further, standing waves can cause both necking and notching in the patterned area. ARCs helpful to reduce standing waves are typically a 130 nm thick polymer which has a high absorbance at the exposure wavelength so as to considerably reduce interference due to reflectance from the substrate.
Despite the forgoing benefits of using ARCs, conventional ARCs used in semiconductor processing are incompatible with the processes used in formation of the active area. The presence of an ARC complicates the task of etching. A layer of metal ARC, such as TiW or TiN, can contaminate the silicon substrate itself. Titanium nitride as an ARC produces mobile ionic contaminates in the active and isolation regions. Polysilicon as an ARC is not easily removed before field oxidation and results in unwanted oxide growth at the polysilicon locations during field oxidation, which oxide growth is not easily removed without removing or undesirably reducing the desired field oxide thickness. Accordingly, there is a need in the art to relieve the critical thickness control requirements of nitride layers in active area stacks.