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Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (한국전자통신연구원)
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Quantum electrodynamical formulation of photochemical acid generation and its implications on optical lithography

  • Seungjin Lee (Quantum Computing Research Section, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute)
  • Received : 2024.03.21
  • Accepted : 2024.08.14
  • Published : 2024.10.10
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Abstract

The photochemical acid generation is refined from the first principles of quantum electrodynamics. First, we briefly review the formulation of the quantum theory of light based on the quantum electrodynamics framework to establish the probability of acid generation at a given spacetime point. The quantum mechanical acid generation is then combined with the deprotection mechanism to obtain a probabilistic description of the deprotection density directly related to feature formation in a photoresist. A statistical analysis of the random deprotection density is presented to reveal the leading characteristics of stochastic feature formation.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

SL expresses gratitude to Dawoon Choi and Yunkyoung Song for their enlightening discussions during the initial phase of this work. This work was partly supported by the Institute for Information & Communications Technology Promotion (IITP) grant (no. 2019-0-00003, Research and Development of Core Technologies for Programming, Running, Implementing, and Validating of Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing System) and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grants (nos. 2024M3K5A1004355, RS-2024-00432214, RS-2023-00281456, and RS-2023-00283771). It is worth noting that this work was partially completed at Samsung Electronics, one of the author's former affiliations.

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