Development of an immersion maskless lithography system

As lithography quickly approaches its limits with current technologies, a host of new ideas is being proposed in hopes of pushing lithography to new levels of performance. The work presented in this thesis explores the use of an immersion scheme to improve the performance of a maskless lithographic technique known as Zone-Plate-Array Lithography (ZPAL). This is believed to be the first implementation of an immersion scheme in a maskless lithography system. This thesis provides a complete description of the Immersion Zone-Plate-Array Lithography (iZPAL) system. Since the zone plate component of the system is largely responsible for its lithographic performance, a thorough analysis of zone plate theory, design, and fabrication is also presented. The focusing performance of an immersion zone plate is then characterized through the experimental reconstruction of its point spread function. Finally, lithography results obtained with the iZPAL system are compared to those obtained with the non-immersion ZPAL system, demonstrating the improvement in resolution, exposure latitude, and depth-of-focus achieved with the immersion scheme.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Chao, David, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Henry I. Smith.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34371

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34371