| Electron beam lithography is one of the most important tools for nanofabrication. Electron beam lithography has consistently been able to offer higher resolution, typically better than 10 nm or so, compared to other techniques. In this work the contribution of electron-substrate interaction to pattern resolution is investigated.;In electron beam lithography the incident beam is scattered in the resist-substrate stack by a combination of elastic and inelastic events which is described by the point spread function. Using a Vistec VB300 Gaussian beam lithography tool operating at 100 keV the experimental point spread function is investigated by a technique called point exposure distribution measurements. The experimental results indicate that the scattering in the sub-100 nm range shows several orders of the magnitude difference with that obtained via Monte Carlo simulations.;In high energy electron beam lithography where forward scattering in small, contribution of secondary electrons generated by the primary beam must be taken into account. The chemical change leading to resist exposure is through bond scission, which is typically a low energy event between 3 – 5 eV. Compared to the primary beam, the secondary electrons have a significantly higher probability of scission due to their lower energy. These secondary electrons are also generated with large emission angles and can travel several nanometers, leading to an increase in observed line widths compared to the size of the beam. An analytical model developed here, that considers the energy deposited by the secondary electrons, is able to predict the dependence of dose on observed diameter to within a reasonable accuracy. This technique used in conjunction with the knowledge of resist contrast is also indicative of pattern resolution limits in high energy electron beam lithography. It is also found that for negative resists, backscatter effects and resist contrast significantly degrade the resolution for large area dense features. |
