Low-Energy Electron Beam Direct Writing Equipment

Abstract

We proposed an electron beam direct writing (EBDW) system capable of high throughput and maskless operation based on a novel concept of using both low-energy electron beam (EB) and character projection (CP) system. We fabricated an EB optical column of low-energy EBDW equipment and obtained a resist pattern. We also investigated the beam blur and line width roughness (LWR) of lines and spaces (L/S) formed on a resist to change various EB current densities and convergence half angles. The obtained results show that a Coulomb interaction effect markedly affects the beam blur in our EB optical column. Thus, we reduce the number of sources caused by LWR and developed photoresists to obtain small LWR L/S patterns for achieving a high throughput.