Park Knowledge Portal

This joint paper from RWTH Aachen University, ASML Netherlands and AMO GmbH reports on the alternative, quick and low-cost method for particle removal from extreme ultraviolet (EUV) photomasks that requires a fundamental understanding of particle adhesion forces. In their study, the authors treat the particle contamination as a particle-plane problem in which surface roughness and the interacting materials have major influences. For this purpose, vacuum atomic force microscopy (Park NX-Hivac AFM) contact measurements to quantify the van der Waals (vdW) forces between tip and sample were performed. This vacuum AFM-based methodology combines numerical Hamaker theory and blind tip reconstruction.