The method of solving initial structure by Seidel aberration theory for extreme ultraviolet lithography objective

Abstract: In this paper, a method for solving the initial structure of an off-axis multi-mirror system applied to extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography using a paraxial ray-tracing algorithm based on Seidel aberration theory is proposed. By tracing the characteristic rays in the reflection system, the height and paraxial angle on each surface can be obtained, then through the relationship between the Seidel aberration coefficient and these parameters, the initial structure with good aberration performance can be solved. We can obtain different initial structures by adding different initial condition constraints. In this paper, we have solved two different initial structures by assigning different optical powers as different initial structures, and on this basis, we have optimized two off-axis six-mirror systems with numerical aperture (NA) of 0.25. Their wavefront aberration RMS value is about 0.04 wavelength, and the absolute distortion is less than 1.2nm, with good imaging quality. We believe that this method can greatly improve the design efficiency and optimization effect of complex multi-mirror systems.