Question

Investigate the use of electron beam lithography to make small structures. Find an example in the literature. Explain its advantages and limitations.

Answer 1

Electron-beam lithography is the act of developing shapes on a surface covered with an electron-sensitive film called a resist. The electron beam changes the solubility of the resist, enabling selective removal of either the exposed or non-exposed regions of the resist by immersing it in a solvent. The purpose is to create very small structures in the resist that can subsequently be transferred to the substrate material, often by etching.

The most important application of electron beam lithography is in chip formation which we use in laptop or mobile. THe pattern of transistor is created using this technique.

Advantage - it can custom patterns with sub-10 nm resolution. This is high resolution with low-volume production of semiconductor devices.

Disadvantage - Physical defects are more varied, and can include sample charging (either negative or positive), backscattering calculation errors, dose errors, contamination, beam drift and particles. Since the write time for electron beam lithography can easily exceed a day, randomly occurring defects are more likely to occur. Here again, larger data files can present more opportunities for defects.

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