An employee in the SMT clean room with a photomask in her hand
Photomask repair solutions

ZEISS MeRiT systems Photomasks featuring zero printable defects by e-beam based mask repair

Scaling trends towards smaller technology nodes and feature sizes are continuing and EUV technology is becoming increasingly important in the semiconductor industry. Associated complexity in mask manufacturing raises significantly and with them the necessity to repair defective high-end photomasks. With MeRiT® ZEISS offers optimized solutions for the repair of all kinds of photomasks enabling the repair of smallest defects.

  • Enables defect-free mask manufacturing
A openedLaptop and several papers
New

Pushing the limits of EUV mask repair

Journal of Micro/Nanopatterning, Materials, and Metrology I Vol. 20 · No. 3 | September 2021

New scientific paper about eBeam based mask repair of defects on EUV masks.
Authors: Tilmann Heil, Michael Waldow, Renzo Capelli, Horst Schneider, Laura Ahmels, Fan Tu, Johannes Schöneberg, Hubertus Marbacha  
http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/1.JMM.20.3.031013.

  

  • A photomask with structures and defects

High precision e-beam mask repair

ZEISS MeRiT systems represent the state-of-the-art tools for repair of high-end photomask based on focused electron beam induced processing. The systems enable the repair of ultra-small defects by high-end electron beam columns optimized for lowest energies. Transparent and opaque defects of many different geometries on binary, phase-shift and EUV masks as well as nanoimprint templates can be repaired. The modular software of the system in conjunction with the pattern copy feature delivers highest degree of automation. The recipe based operation provides a high flexibility and allows user specific extensions for upcoming mask types.

Down below you find the variety of the current MeRiT® systems

A section of a photomask with defects to repair
A section of a photomask whose defective structures have been repaired

Defect-free mask manufacturing — Smallest defect repair enables flawless mask production

It is essential to manufacture defect-free masks, as every defect on the photomask will be printed multiple times on the wafer resulting in defective microchips. As almost every mask has defects, a reliable and effective repair technology is needed. Gas-assisted electron-beam (e-beam) lithography enables the repair of every kind of defect on all kinds of masks. Especially for very small features sizes as they occur on EUV masks, MeRiT® is the only available solution on the market that is able to reliably repair these defects.

How to Repair High-end EUV Photomasks

Watch the new video about ZEISS MeRiT® LE

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