A Precision Dose Control Circuit for Maskless E-Beam Lithography With Massively Parallel Vertically Aligned Carbon Nanofibers

This paper describes a highly accurate dose control circuit (DCC) for the emission of a desired number of electrons from vertically aligned carbon nanofibers (VACNFs) in a massively parallel maskless e-beam lithography system. The parasitic components within the VACNF device cause a premature termination of the electron emission, resulting in underexposure of the photoresist. In this paper, we compensate for the effects of the parasitic components and noise while reducing the area of the chip and achieving a precise count of emitted electrons from the VACNFs to obtain the optimum dose for the e-beam lithography.

[1]  L. P. Muray,et al.  Arrayed miniature electron beam columns for high throughput sub-100 nm lithography , 1992 .

[2]  Lawrence P. Muray,et al.  Sub- 100-nm lithography with miniature electron beam columns , 2006 .

[3]  M. L. Simpson,et al.  Vertically aligned carbon nanofiber-based field emission electron sources with an integrated focusing electrode , 2004 .

[4]  G. Amaratunga,et al.  Fabrication and electrical characteristics of carbon nanotube-based microcathodes for use in a parallel electron-beam lithography system , 2003 .

[5]  L. Baylor,et al.  Microfabricated field emission devices using carbon nanofibers as cathode elements , 2001 .

[6]  V. Binh,et al.  Microguns with 100-V electron beams , 1998 .

[7]  P. Burke,et al.  An RF circuit model for carbon nanotubes , 2002, Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE Conference on Nanotechnology.

[8]  M. Ericson,et al.  Integration of a Dose Control Circuit with a Vertically Aligned NanoFiber Field Emission Device , 2007, 2006 19th International Vacuum Nanoelectronics Conference.

[9]  L. Baylor,et al.  All-inverter complementary metal oxide semiconductor based dose control circuit for using vertically aligned carbon nanofibers in maskless lithography , 2006 .

[10]  Gehan A. J. Amaratunga,et al.  Carbon nanotubes as field emission sources , 2004 .

[11]  H. Mimura,et al.  A monolithic field emitter array with a JFET , 2002 .

[12]  J. H. Whealton,et al.  Digital electrostatic electron-beam array lithography , 2002 .

[13]  Gehan A. J. Amaratunga,et al.  Fabrication and electrical characteristics of carbon nanotube field emission microcathodes with an integrated gate electrode , 2002 .

[14]  M. L. Simpson,et al.  Operation of a gated field emitter using an individual carbon nanofiber cathode , 2001 .

[15]  M. Ericson,et al.  A precision dose control circuit for vertically aligned carbon nanofiber based maskless lithography , 2009, 2009 22nd International Vacuum Nanoelectronics Conference.

[16]  M. L. Simpson,et al.  Initial lithography results from the digital electrostatic e-beam array lithography concept , 2004 .

[17]  Syed K. Islam,et al.  Dose control circuit for digital electrostatic electron-beam array lithography , 2006 .

[18]  M. Ericson,et al.  Digitally addressable vertically aligned carbon nanofibers for implementation of massively parallel maskless lithography , 2007, 2007 International Semiconductor Device Research Symposium.

[19]  Behzad Razavi,et al.  Design of Analog CMOS Integrated Circuits , 1999 .