Organic Resist Contrast Determination in Ion Beam Lithography.

The feature of the promising tool of lithographic nanostructuring based on selective exposure of polymer resist by ion beam is very compact (of about tens of nanometers) beam interaction volume. Herewith the main part of beam energy is deposited in the resist and is spent to its modification. It causes the set of advantages specific for this method: sub-10 nanometer resolution achievable, very high energy efficiency and almost complete absence of proximity effect. But also due to this feature absorbed doze essentially inhomogeneous in resist and the dissolution rate is strongly dependent on depth. So the common procedure of resist contrast determination cannot be applied anymore. In the present work a new method for resist contrast determination considering the relation between dissolution rate and deposited energy density is suggested and realized. By using it for PMMA resist irradiated by 30 keV Ga+ ion beam the value of contrast was determined to be 3.1 and ions energy length was estimated to be 42 nm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]