A SOFTWARE TOOL FOR GENERATION OF MONSEL LIBRARIES.

A means of simulating electron trajectories and secondary generation in scanning electron microscope samples is an essential piece of the library-based linewidth measurement system being developed under contract with SEMATECH. The NIST code for doing this, called "MONSEL," has some important advantages compared to commercial codes. Developed at NIST, it adopts a more fundamental approach, simulating, for example, secondary electron trajectories in detail instead of treating them in an average way, and because of this a commercial code with free parameters may adjust those parameters in order to obtain agreement with the MONSEL results. However, MONSEL lacks some of the convenience features present in commercial software. Particularly relevant for our library-based linewidth measurement system is the fact that MONSEL's inputs are in the form of files, which must be painstakingly edited for each of the hundreds of simulations that must be performed to generate a library. Accordingly, we have developed a new sof tware tool that automatically: generates the input files required for each of the possible combinations of user-specified edge shape parameters; generates a batch file that runs MONSEL once for each such parameter combination and copies MONSEL's output file to a file with a unique name; and generates a directory of these file names and the shape parameters that are associated with them. The new tool was used to begin simulations for two new model libraries, one for an isolated polysilicon line and one for densely packed polysilicon lines, on four of NIST's high performance computers. The simulations are expected to require approximately a week on each of the four computers to complete.