Electron beam lithography equipment

ELS BODEN (STS-Elionix, 2024) is an electron beam lithography system capable to exposure over relatively large area patters with down to 10 nm resolution. Key features:

• Beam:
  • Up to 100nA current
  • Down to 2.0 nm beam diameter
  • 50 kV electron voltage
  • Field size up to 1.5mm x 1.5mm
  • 100 MHz scan clock / 20 bit DAC
• 210×210 mm2 exposure area
• By default holders to (holder drawings can be found below):
  • Wafers 50mm to 200 mm
  • Mask blanks 4” x 4” to 7” x 7”
  • Small samples with at least one right angle (size max 50 x 50 mm)
  • More holders can be procured with extra financing (~25 k€/pcs)
• Stitching < +/-15 nm
• Overlay < +/- 20nm
• Mix and match lithography when combined with laser exposure or UV-lithography

Lithography 

Typical lithography run includes coating substrate with electron sensitive polymer or photo-resist and pre-baking it prior loading to aligner. EBL tool uses scanning electron beam to define areas that are either soluble or insoluble to developer. Tool can only scan over small area, i.e. 1 mm x 1 mm because electron optics can’t maintain beam position tolerance over larger area. For this reason system is equipped with ultra-precise moving stage capable to with very high aboluste accuracy monitored by two laser interferometers.

Our tool is equipped with automatic calibration for beam current size, shape and location making it relatively straightforward to expose patterns. Patterns can be either be pre generated in for example GDSII file or it is possible to generate all polygons with script that generates them on the fly. Later is very useful in applications that would need excessively large file sizes.