Study on the Recognition of the Registration Marks for Low-Energy Microcolumn Lithography

The electron beam lithography has been paid great attention as a future lithography technology for the patterning of extremely fine structures. Generally the e-beam lithography means high-energy e-beam lithography where the kinetic energies of electrons are rather high(10~100 keV). Although the high-energy e-beam technology is mature and being used in semiconductor industry, the low-energy microcolumn lithography(LEML) has many great advantages as a next-generation technology, which explains the active research on the subject these days. In this work, we developed a new method to recognize the registration marks in LEML. With this novel method, there is no need to supply the bias to the mark electrodes, which remarkably simplifies the fabrication process of IC devices.