EQUIcon (Germany)

Abstract Well intervention challenges present opportunities to develop new technologies that increase operation efficiency and effectiveness. A revolutionary real-time hybrid coiled tubing (CT) service marks a new era of informed interventions. This paper highlights the results from 3 years of field operations using this real-time hybrid CT technology to improve well interventions economically, logistically, operationally, and technically by performing analysis and making decisions in real time. Previous techniques used wireline units to perform real-time operations, which often required production shut-in and multiple runs to avoid operational issues (i.e., tool lifting in wells with high production rates). CT electric line units mitigate the shut-in requirement, but reduce the pipe pulling capabilities and limit the fluids and rates to be pumped through the pipe. CT with fiber-optics technology helps eliminate the shut-in requirement and the fluids and rates restrictions, without affecting the CT pulling capabilities. However, operating time is limited because of the power source life. During the 3-year period, more than 1 million running feet of CT well interventions were performed in the eastern foothills of Colombia, where challenging conditions, such as high gas production rate, high tortuosity, and dogleg severity, were overcome using the real-time hybrid CT service. The real-time hybrid CT service includes an open architecture system that provides the capability to pump any fluid type at different rates through the CT and hybrid downhole tool. Additionally, the system is compatible with all electric and mechanical tools using a plug-and-play adapter to attach tools in a single rig up, which helps eliminate additional rig up and rig down of units to perform other types of well interventions. A continuous power supply allows operations to be performed without time or power constraints. This paper reviews previous case histories in which multiple interventions were successfully performed in a single run using real-time hybrid CT technology, including zonal isolation, well surveillance, access recovery, stimulations, production logging, injection logging, completion visualization, and perforating under extreme underbalanced conditions with extremely long bottomhole assemblies (BHAs). The flexibility of the real-time hybrid CT technology provides multiple opportunities to address new challenges in the oil industry without limits.

Lithographic patterning encounters growing challenges to meet the requirements of current and future semiconductor technology nodes. Even e-beam lithography is challenged due to the physical characteristic of the whole transfer process including the e-beam blur, electron scattering, and resist effects. These effects cause an unavoidable blurring of the exposed shapes and are often described as process proximity effect. Besides the correction of this process proximity effect pattern contrast and process window for the lithography step have to be regarded. There are promising approaches for contrast enhancing proximity effect correction concepts. To enable a stable patterning great efforts have to be put into decreasing the errors of all involved technologies. The blurring resulting from the transfer process is usually described by a so-called process proximity function (PPF) and mostly approximated by a superposition of two or more Gaussian functions. All algorithms for proximity effect correction use that PPF to perform their correction. Thus, an accurate determination of that PPF contributes to reducing the error budget of the proximity effect correction scheme. Several methods for PPF calibration were introduced in the past. Some are based on modelling the transfer process and performing Monte Carlo simulations. Another common approach is to design and expose calibration patterns, measure the resulting CDs, and obtain the process proximity function as the result of a simulation based parameter fitting to a model function such as a sum of Gaussian functions. In order to respect the increased accuracy requirements an even more accurate description of the PPF is expected. This paper describes the newly developed PPF-explorer method for the calibration of a pointwise proximity function as a complementary technique, which is based on the exposure and evaluation of new calibration layouts. Following the common assumption that a process proximity function is radial-symmetric, we developed radial-symmetric calibration layouts.

For current and future semiconductor technology nodes with critical dimensions of 32 nm or below, the e-beam lithography is faced with increasing challenges to achieve a reasonable patterning of structures, especially if a process with a chemically amplified resist is used. The reasons for these limitations are the physical properties of the transfer process used to print a structure onto the resist-coated substrate, which inherently contains an unavoidable blurring of the deposited e-beam energy around the desired shape. This blurring is usually described by a so called process proximity function (PPF) and mostly approximated by a superposition of two or more Gaussian functions. The PPF includes the e-beam blur, electron forward scattering and resist effects (often described altogether by the so called alpha parameter of the PPF [K. Keil et al, "Resolution and total blur: Correlation and focus-dependencies in e-beam lithography," J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 27, 2722 (2009)]) as well as the backscattering effect (often described by the so called beta parameter of the PPF). When the desired critical dimensions of structures are near or below the alpha parameter of the PPF, depending on their environment it may be just impossible to print the structures because of the vanishing image contrast. The PPF model confirms this well-known behavior but also shows ways and limits for improvements. This paper provides real pattern lithography results - comparing classical and GIDC correction - for exposures done on a Vistec SB3050DW shaped e-beam writer. A performance comparison of the GIDC method and the classical dose correction in terms of data preparation and writing time is presented.

The requirements for advanced lithography solutions are constantly increasing. Up to now the optical lithography with its extension into the immersion lithography and strong resolution enhancement techniques (RET) represents the lithography solution of choice. With decreasing critical dimensions (CD) new approaches are needed to provide cost effective methods for small and medium volume production on one side and for efficient photomask fabrication including the RET on the other side. A viable solution for both application fields is the Multi Shaped Beam (MSB) technology, which is currently being developed at Vistec Electron Beam in Jena. E-beam technology has already been used for R&D as well as prototyping applications well ahead of the respective production technology node. It is as well the technology of choice for the future mask fabrication. However, the decreasing CD and thus increasing pattern density asks for new ideas to overcome the throughput challenges faced today. This bottleneck is addressed by parallel writing methods where MSB is one of these techniques. In correlation with the MSB writing technology an appropriate data preparation path is mandatory. One major criterion for the performance of MSB data processing is the shot count reduction which can be reached for different types of patterns. In this paper results from an analysis of the current status of MSB shot segmentation are reported. Beside collecting statistical data of the individual structure size distribution an analysis of the shot count on different pattern coming from mask write as well as direct write applications was carried out. This was performed for different technology nodes and the results are compared.

At the EMLC 2009 in Dresden the data preparation package ePLACE was already presented. This package has been used for quite different applications covering mask write, direct write and special applications. In this paper we will disclose results achieved when using the ePLACE package for processing of layout data of immediate interest. During the evaluation phase of the new solution we could benefit from broad experience we collected over many years with the fracture performance of the MGS software, which is one core element of today's ePLACE package. A key interest of this paper is the investigation of the scalability of computing solutions as a cost-effective approach when processing huge data volumes with the new solution. This is reflected against current state-of-the-art data processing tasks being part of both mask write and direct write applications. Furthermore, we evaluated visualization and simulation possibilities of the ePLACE package with respect to its use with latest layouts in various applications. The improved performance of the data preparation package including its adaptation to new e-beam lithography options, as, for instance, the incorporation of the cell projection capability or the newly developed Multi Shaped Beam (MSB) technology, will be also discussed. As an example the matching of the data path with a Vistec SB3055 will be outlined. Processing of Design For E-Beam (DFEB) data (including cell contents) and their conversion to real exposure data is reported. The advantages of the parallel use of standard shaped beam und cell projection technologies are highlighted focussing on latest writing time yields achieved when applying the CP feature.