Abstract
An experimental method is proposed to measure the exact size of the ion beam produced by a liquid metal Ga ion source in Focused Ion Beam systems. This method involves the fabrication of arrays of trenches having different periods, followed by Atomic Force Microscope measurements and further uncomplicated calculations. This method gives the ion beam profile in terms of beam current density at any distance from the centre of the beam and with a resolution in the range of a few nanometres. The method proposed in this paper shows that the beam size measured by the classical sweeping across a knife edge method is several times smaller than the exact size and therefore it is not directly related with the real resolution of the fabrication system, especially when dealing with low ion beam current levels suitable for nanotechnology. At an ion beam current of 1 pA, the tail region widens the beam to 30 nm from its centre, imposing limits to the resolution in terms of minimum period that is expected taking into account only the core part of the ion beam.
Highlights
The concept of resolution of a manufacturing system is very important, especially when it is referred to a nanofabrication tool
An experimental method is proposed to measure the exact size of the ion beam produced by a liquid metal Ga ion source in Focused Ion Beam systems
This method involves the fabrication of arrays of trenches having different periods, followed by Atomic Force Microscope measurements and further uncomplicated calculations
Summary
The concept of resolution of a manufacturing system is very important, especially when it is referred to a nanofabrication tool. These errors are in particular due to uncertainties arising from a high noise level resulting from ion beam electrical currents levels several times smaller than the normal current levels In these studies, the authors use other methods to measure the actual sizes of an ion beam. We present in this paper a new experimental method to measure the ion beam profile in terms of beam current density at any distance from the centre of an ion beam with a resolution of few nanometres This method implies the fabrication by FIB of several arrays of trenches having different periods of values ranging from larger to smaller than the expected diameter of the ion beam. The method is applied to the ion beam current of a FIB system carrying a current of 1 pA
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