Abstract

Motivated by trends in the microelectronics industry and the quest to investigate electronic and material properties in the quantum effect size regime, there is a strong drive to understand and overcome the limits of the processing required for microfabrication. At the beginning of the next century, the precision required in feature sizes for microelectronics manufacturing is projected to be close to 10 nm, i.e. about 25 atomic diameters. Still smaller feature sizes are needed for nanoelectronic device research. For example, to observe effects such as lateral resonant tunneling and coulomb blockade at close to room temperature, feature sizes below 10 nm are necessary. Central to any fabrication scheme for these dimensions is a lithographic step where a pattern is defined in a radiation sensitive material, commonly called the resist, and then replicated into the substrate to define a structure or device. Due to the availability of equipment and knowledge base, the preferred means for defining the smallest possible structures involves the use of a focused high energy beam of electrons.

© 1995 Optical Society of America