Modeling of EUV emission from xenon and tin plasma sources for nanolithography

Over the last decade there has been a major effort devoted to the development of efficient extreme UV sources designed for nanolithography, operating in the 13.5-nm range. Possible sources include laser-produced plasmas and discharge-produced plasmas. This paper, devoted to the modeling of such emission, emphasizes the atomic physics effects and particularly the effects of configuration interaction. Two types of theoretical approaches are presented, one involving the detailed computation with the parametric potential code HULLAC, the other based on the superconfiguration code SCO. Computations of emission spectra in xenon and tin are presented. The possible influence of non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (NLTE) effects is investigated using populations given by the simple collisional-radiative formulas from Colombant and Tonon. Convergence to LTE is analyzed in the tin case. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.