Abstract Focused ion beam milling (FIBM) is an effective technique widely used for processing microstructures. To ensure the accuracy of microstructures, it is necessary to explore the cause and improvement methods of defects that may occur during FIBM. This article reports a pore defect when processing a concave spherical structure with a depth of 1 μm and a diameter of 10 μm by FIBM bitmap patterning on a hydrocarbon amorphous polymer (a-C:H), whose roughness factor Rp is up to approximately 1.51 μm. In previous studies on defects of FIBM, there was still a lack of relevant research on cause and improvement methods of pore defects. In this article, experiments of different relative parameters of FIBM are conducted to explore the conditions of occurrence and two-dimensional simulation programs for FIBM are designed to explore the relationship between the defects and morphology of the sample. By combining the analysis of parameters with the simulation results, a conclusion on the cause of pore defects is made in this article. When processing a certain depth close to the roughness factor of surface, ion beam with small diameters and grayscale pixels that influence the movement distance will alter the depth and the size of lower regions of surface while maintaining the original fluctuation features, which ultimately forms a pore structure. Based on the conclusion, effective methods of changing the processing depth or increasing the ion beam diameter and movement distance have been proposed to improve the defects, which is demonstrated through experiments and simulation programs, and further verifies the correctness of the conclusion. The conclusion on cause and improvement methods in this article will provide guidance for precise microstructure processing of surfaces with poor roughness conditions by FIBM.
Read full abstract