A Monte Carlo study of the primary absorbed energy redistribution in X-ray lithography

The minimum feature size producible by LIGA X-ray lithography is fundamentally limited by the redistribution of primary doses via photoelectrons and the influence of the resulting dose distribution on resist development. Secondary radiation from mask and substrate are well known as source for pattern distortion in deep X-ray lithography. Numerical simulations by means of Monte Carlo simulations using PENELOPE (Salvat et al. in PENELOPE-2008: a code system for Monte Carlo simulation of electron and photon transport. http://www.nea.fr/html/dbprog/penelope-2008.pdf, 2008) are applied to quantify these additional dose values in the resist/substrate interface and the irradiated/shadowed interface. A significant reduction of the additional dose by secondary radiation from the plating base is not observed for Au and Ti layers thicker than 10 nm. The influence of polarized or unpolarized X-rays might be neglected for structure dimensions larger than a few 10 nm. As an example of critical dimension, simulations were used to predict the structure quality of grating structures with a period of 2.4 μm and duty cycle 0.5 in a resist layer of 300 μm.