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Published December 23, 2022 | Published
Journal Article Open

Negative Tone Metallic Organic Resists with Improved Sensitivity for Plasma Etching: Implications for Silicon Nanostructure Fabrication and Photomask Production

Abstract

Metal–organic materials such as [NH₂(CH₂–CH═CH₂)₂][Cr₇NiF₈(Pivalate)₁₆] can act as negative tone resists for electron beam lithography (EBL) with high-resolution patterning of sub-40 nanometer pitch while exhibiting ultrahigh dry etch selectivities >100:1 and giving line dose exposures >11,000 pC/cm. It is clear that the resist sensitivity is too low to be used to manufacture the latest nanoscale photomasks that are suitable for extreme ultraviolet lithography. Therefore, the focus of this work here is to improve the sensitivity of this resist while maintaining its resolution and dry etch selectivity. Using our latest Monte Carlo simulation called Excalibur, we predict that the sensitivity would increase by a factor of 1.4 when the nickel atom is substituted by a cadmium atom. EBL studies showed an excellent agreement with the simulation, and plasma etching studies demonstrated that this did not affect the dry etch performance of the resist which remains very good with a selectively of ca. 99:1 for the etching of silicon at these resolutions with a low sensitivity of 7995 pC/cm.

Additional Information

© 2022 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society. Permits the broadest form of re-use including for commercial purposes, provided that author attribution and integrity are maintained (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This research was supported by the European Research Council through ERC-2017-ADG-786734 awarded to REPW. It is also supported by EPSRC (UK) (EP/R023158/1 and EP/R011079/1). We are also grateful to the University of Manchester for support. The authors declare no competing financial interest.

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Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023