As EUV lithography transitions to high volume manufacturing, actinic photomask inspection tools at 13.5 nm wavelength are attractive for understanding the printability of EUV mask defects, as well as for in-fab monitoring for possible defects emerging from extended use. Ptychography is a lensless imaging technique that allows for phase-and-amplitude, aberration-free, high-resolution imaging in the EUV. Moreover, sources based on high harmonic generation (HHG) of ultrafast lasers are a proven viable coherent light source for CDI, with flux sufficient for rapid large-area inspection and small-area imaging. By combining CDI and HHG, we implemented actinic EUV photomask inspection on a low-cost tabletop-scale setup. Moreover, we propose and demonstrate a solution to the decade-long challenge of ptychographic imaging of periodic structures through careful illumination engineering.
Spatiotemporal orbital angular momentum (ST-OAM) of light is an emergent, spatiotemporally sculptured light. Such spatiotemporal optical vortices carry transverse OAM and exhibit novel properties. However, the lack of a simple and straightforward characterization method substantially slows its progress and potential adaptions for future applications. Here we demonstrated a simple, stationary, single-frame method to quantitatively characterize ST-OAM pulses. Our new method can measure the presence of ST-OAM, space-time topological charge numbers, OAM helicity, pulse dispersion, and beam divergence. We also investigated the nonlinear properties of ST-OAM pulses, uncovering the conservation of space-time topological charges in a second-harmonic generation process.
As EUV lithography transitions to high volume manufacturing, actinic inspection tools at 13.5 nm wavelength are attractive for understanding the printability of EUV mask defects, as well as for in-fab monitoring for possible defects emerging from extended use. Coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) is a lensless imaging technique that allows for phaseand-amplitude, aberration-free, high-resolution imaging in the EUV. Moreover, sources based on high harmonic generation (HHG) of ultrafast lasers are a proven viable coherent light source for CDI, with flux sufficient for rapid large-area inspection and small-area imaging. By combining CDI and HHG, we implemented actinic EUV photomask inspection on a low-cost tabletop-scale setup. Moreover, we propose and demonstrate a solution to the challenge of ptychographic imaging of periodic structures through careful illumination engineering.
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