Design method of off-axis extreme ultraviolet lithographic objective system with a direct tilt process

An off-axis extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithographic objective can achieve a high numerical aperture (NA) beyond 0.33 with only six mirrors due to the efficient separation of the ray path, which greatly improves the resolution and energy utilization. A method is developed to design an off-axis lithographic objective with six mirrors. The method starts with a coaxial system with ray vignetting caused by increase of the NA. To avoid the ray vignetting, a reasonable range of solution for the tilt angle of each mirror is determined by real ray calculation. A set of optimal solutions for tilt angles of mirrors, which corresponds to the minimal composite root-mean-square wavefront error, is found from the reasonable ranges of solutions by a search program. In this way, an initial off-axis configuration without ray vignetting can be directly obtained and it is suitable for further optimization. To demonstrate the practicability of the method, an off-axis design example is given which shows that the presented method provides an efficient process to get to initial configuration for off-axis EUV lithographic objective with six mirrors.