Evaluation of e-beam repair for nanoimprint templates

Two essential process steps of the template fabrication chain are inspection and repair. The widely introduced gas assisted e-beam etching and deposition technique for mask repair offers crucial advantages, especially regarding the resolution capability. We started the evaluation of a new e-beam repair test stand based on the Zeiss MeRiT technology for UV-NIL template repair. For this purpose, templates with programmed defects of different shapes and sizes have been designed and fabricated. The repair experiments were focused on the development of recipes for quartz etching and deposition specifically tailored for NIL repair requirements Both, clear and opaque programmed defects have been repaired and the results have been analyzed. After recipe optimization, templates with repaired programmed defects have been imprinted on a Molecular Imprints Imprio 250 tool. By comparing template and imprint results we investigated the repair capability.