Energy spread of ion beams generated in multicusp ion sources

Abstract

For the production of future microelectronics devices, various alternate methods are currently being considered to replace the presently used method of lithography with ion beam lithography. One of these methods is Ion Projection Lithography (IPL), which aims at the possibility of projecting sub-0.25 /spl mu/m patterns of a stencil mask onto a wafer substrate. In order to keep the chromatic aberrations below 25 nm, an ion source which delivers a beam with energy spread of less than 3 eV is desired. For this application, multicusp ion sources are being considered. We measure the longitudinal energy spread of the plasma ions by using a two-grid electrostatic energy analyzer. The energy spread of the extracted beam is measured by a high-voltage retarding-field energy analyzer. In order to obtain the transverse ion temperature, a parallel-plate scanner is being set up to study the beam emittance. In this paper, comparisons are made for different ion source configurations.