Iron-based metallic glass for improved resolution, maskless phase-change photolithography

Abstract

Phase-change lithography (PCL) is expected to become the next generation of mainstream lithography for its high efficiency, non-toxic nature, and maskless technique. However, the low resolution of current PCL limits its practical application. We propose to use FeMoCrCBY metallic glass film as a high-resolution photoresistor in PCL, which can greatly improve the resolution more than other metallic glasses because of its high heat capacity and crystallization temperature. Thermal distribution in FeMoCrCBY indicates that the feature size of the phase transition region can controllably be made smaller. For example, the size of micro-patterns observed by scanning electron microscope (SEM) is around 1.3 µm. The resolution can be further improved by reducing the laser spot size. Our results show that metallic glass film FeMoCrCBY is a promising photoresistor for high-resolution PCL.