Quantum Simulations for Extreme Ultraviolet Photolithography

Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography is the state-of-the-art process in semiconductor fabrication, yet its spatial resolution is fundamentally limited by the "blur" originating from absorption of photons at 92 eV, which induce physical and chemical changes in the photoresist via excited state processes and electron cascades. Accurate modeling of these phenomena requires precise ab initio data for high-energy decay channels, specifically photoabsorption and photoelectron emission. These are computationally difficult for classical methods due to prohibitive scaling in simulating electron dynamics, or due to the inability to resolve the ionization continuum in an efficient manner. In this work, we present quantum simulation algorithms to compute these key observables. First, we introduce a coherent time-domain spectroscopy algorithm optimized to resolve the photoabsorption cross-section at the 92 eV operating frequency. Second, we develop a first-quantized plane-wave simulation to compute the photoelectron kinetic energy spectrum, utilizing real-time dynamics and energy windowing to treat bound and delocalized scattering states on equal footing. Additionally, we provide logical resource estimation for a model photoresist monomer, 4-iodo-2-methylphenol (IMePh), and demonstrate that 92 eV absorption sensitivity can be resolved using roughly 200 logical qubits and 10⁹ total non-Clifford gates per circuit with approximately 10³ shots for the smallest instance. The more sophisticated photoemission algorithm that models the continuum explicitly, incurs gate costs of geq 10¹³ total non-Clifford gates per circuit, 10⁴ shots, and requires a few thousand logical qubits. These results establish high-fidelity quantum simulations as a key component to parameterize the multi-scale macroscopic models required to overcome the electron blur bottleneck in semiconductor miniaturization.