Ultimate 3D e-beam lithography for nano/micro-structuring with NanoMaker

Large and sophisticated electron beam lithography instruments are a necessity in modern IC production - but besides this, there are many applications which need electron beam lithography at a much smaller scale. For example precisely grown in z-direction heterostuctures, quantum walls, lattice and layers with quntum dots must be further subjected to patterning by e-beam lithography in lateral direction to fabricate working devices for microelectronics and optoelectronics. Some other fields are: optimizing of electron resist, integrated optics experiments, X-ray optics with zone lenses, experiments with individually created IC components, window etching in ICs for failure analysis, epitactic and galvanic experiments.

Sources of accuracy losses are related to e-beam machine in use as well as to some physical reasons like scattering fast electrons in a sample or development of exposed resist. All these factors could be successively compensated with special software package "Proxy for Windows" ("NanoMaker", www.nanomaker.ru ). The package was used for transformation of any scanning electron microscope into laboratory e-beam lithograph. But the software can be used with industrial lithographs providing ultimate resolution of the e-beam writer and increasing stability and tolerance of the lithography.

Methods of eliminating inaccuracies of SEM are described in the report. Examples of nano/micro structuring with application in different areas (microdevices, microoptics, diffractive optics, cell biology etc.) are presented.

Special attention is paid to application of the software to industrial lithographs (like ZBA-20, ...).

B. N. Gaifullin¹, A. A. Svintsov², S.I. Zaitsev^2
1INTERFACE Ltd, Moscow (http://www.interface.ru)
²IMT RAS, Chernogolovka, Moscow distr. 142432, Russia. E-mail: