There are a large number of materials, both organic and inorganic, which are sensitive to light (see, for example, Ref. 1). However, over the years one specific class of photosensitive materials has been dominate in the application of integrated circuit manufacturing -the diazonaphthoquinone/novolak system found in conventional g-line and i-line positive photoresists. Rather than present a comp...

Block copolymer nanolithography has been extended to the nanopatterning of organic functionalities on pyrolyzed photoresist carbon films (PPFs) via diazonium chemistry, using PS-b-P4VP as the template.

The use of transverse electric (TE) polarization has dominated illumination schemes as selective polarization is used for high-NA patterning. The benefits of TE polarization are clear – the interference of diffracted beams remains absolute at oblique angles. Transverse magnetic (TM) polarization is usually considered less desirable as imaging modulation from interference at large angle falls of...

The physical limitations of lithographic imaging are ultimately imposed by the refractive indices of the materials involved. At oblique collection angles, the numerical aperture of an optical system is determined by nsin(θ) , where n is the lowest material refractive index (in the absence of any refractive power through curvature). For 193nm water immersion lithography, the fluid is the limitin...

We have developed a sensor to measure the glass transition temperature (T,) of photoresist during its pre-exposure bake. During prebake, the resist must reach this temperature in order for significant solvent evaporation to occur. To determine T, we measured the change in phase of a high frequency pulse as it was reflected from the interface between an 8” silicon wafer and a photoresist film. T...

Physicochemical and electrochemical characterization of carbon films obtained by pyrolyzing a commercially available photoresist has been performed. Photoresist spin-coated on to a silicon wafer was pyrolyzed at 1,000 degrees C in a reducing atmosphere (95% nitrogen and 5% hydrogen) to produce conducting carbon films. The pyrolyzed photoresist films (PPF) show unusual surface properties compare...

Complex optical systems such as high-quality microcavities enabled by advanced lithography and processing techniques paved the way to various light-matter interactions (LMI) studies. Without lattice-matching constraints in epitaxy, coating or shaky open cavity constructions, sub-micrometer-precise lithographic development of a polymer photoresist paves microcavity structures for spectral region...

Surface flattening techniques are extremely important for the development of future electrical and/or optical devices because carrier-scattering losses due to surface roughness severely limit the performance of nanoscale devices. To address the problem, we have developed a near-field etching technique that provides selective etching of surface protrusions, resulting in an atomically flat surfac...

This letter demonstrates the use of an array of transparent microspheres in forming repetitive, micrometer-scale patterns in photoresist, starting from masks with centimeter-scale patterns. A transparent microsphere with diameter d.1.5 mm acts as a lens and reduces centimeter-scale images into micrometer-scale images on its image plane. A planar array of microspheres projects the image of an il...

Three dimensional (3D) super-resolution can be achieved in microscopy instruments by means of phase masks that shape the point spread function [1]. Grey level lithography is an attractive procedure for the generation of these phase masks. The photolithographic phase masks (PPM) encode the light emitted from a specimen via a topographical index of refraction variation consisting of a series of p...