An electron beam nanolithography system and its application to Si nanofabrication

We present an electron beam nanolithography system which features sub-10-nm beam size 480 x 480 mu m(2) field and a high 70kV acceleration voltage with a Zr/O/W thermal field emitter tip. A beam can be deflected at 100 MHz in 2-nm steps, which allows the use of highly sensitive resist. The system is equipped with a highly sensitive YAG detector for electrons backscattered from a registration mark as well as a C/W multilayer knife edge for beam size measurement and focusing. These techniques achieve a beam size of about 6 nm. A 10nm-scale resist pattern was obtained using ZEP520 resist with this system. Furthermore, Si nanostructures have been obtained by using an image reversal process with ECR plasma oxidation. Photoluminescence was observed from the Si nanowires fabricated with this system.