Nikon’s Intelligent Illuminator, a freeform pupilgram generator, realizes a high flexibility for pupilgram control by using more than 10,000 degrees-of-freedom for pupilgram adjustment. In this work, an Intelligent Illuminator was integrated into an ArF scanner, the Nikon NSR-S621D. We demonstrate the pupilgram setting accuracy by direct correlation between on-body measured pupilgram and desired target pupilgram. We show that the Intelligent Illuminator is used for fine tuning of the pupilgram to match optical proximity effect (OPE) characteristics. We experimentally confirmed that a global source optimization software realized an improvement of lithographic process window without changing OPE characteristics by using optimized pupilgram made by Intelligent Illuminator.
