Electron beam technology for single nanometer fabrication

To follow Moore’s law and the trend of devices to keep shrinking, the nanotechnology industry is challenged in finding a suitable technique for the mass production of integrated circuits with critical dimension in the sub-10 nm range. At the time this project started, EUV lithography, that employs light with a wavelength of 13.5 nm and thus requires the scanner to be kept under vacuum, was encountering difficulties in making its way into high volume manufacturing. Therefore different technologies were being explored as alternative to EUVL. The European project Single Nanometer Manufacturing for beyond CMOS devices (SNM) [1] aims at developing a manufacturing platform that routinely provides sub-10 nm resolution. To achieve that, fabrication processes based on Nano Imprint Lithography (NIL) are investigated. NIL is a low cost, high resolution and high throughput patterning technique, suitable for the mass production of devices. In NIL, a UV-transparent stamp is pressed on top of a substrate covered with polymer, called the NIL resist. The features on the stamp are imprinted in this polymer, that hardens under the exposure of UV light. The features on the polymer are then transferred into the underlying substrate using etching processes. To fabricate these stamps, we propose to use electron beam induced deposition (EBID)...