In the process scenario of combining contact lithography and laser interference lithography, the gap between the mask and the substrate may cause a series of problems, such as reducing the contrast of the pattern, misalignment of the two interference beams, and unexpected macroscopic patterns. This article introduces a method of adding refractive index matching liquid to suppress interference caused by gaps. Matching liquids can buffer the refractive index changes at the interface of the medium. As a result, the reflectivity of the medium interface decreases, thereby suppressing harmful macroscopic patterns. In addition, matching liquids can reduce the refractive angle of interference beams, thereby reducing their misalignment and increasing the area ratio of effective patterns. This article identified suitable matching liquid materials and conducted numerical simulations and analysis to demonstrate the effect of adding matching liquid on improving pattern contrast. For the production of gratings ranging from 550nm to 1500nm, the stripe contrast is below 0.05. In summary, the most suitable refractive index matching liquid has been explored and tested under the given refractive index of the mask and substrate. Experiments have shown that adding matching liquids can provide significant advantages.
The tight contact of the mask and the substrate is essential in contact lithography for reducing unnecessary diffraction and improving the resolution. This enables contact lithography to reach sub-micrometer resolution and thus shows a great prospect of fabricating arrayed sub-micrometer structure. However, the direct contact of the mask and the substrate and the pressure between the mask and the substrate may lead to the deformation of the photoresist film or the substrate, and affect the micro-structure on the photoresist layer. Therefore, it is necessary to verify whether the change of the pattern size of micro-structure caused by the deformation of the photoresist film and substrate is within the allowable error range.
This paper takes the silicon wafer spin-coated with S1805 photoresist as the research object, and conducts static pressure experiments and interference exposure experiments. Within a pressure of 300 kPa, there is little variation in the thickness of the photoresist film, and it has no significant effect on the pattern size on the photoresist layer. The result shows that when fabricating arrayed sub-micrometer structures, the change of the pattern size of micro-structure is within the allowable error range. Therefore, this paper demonstrates the theoretical feasibility of contact lithography with the pressure in the fabrication of arrayed sub-micrometer structures.
Large-area gratings play a critical role in various fields such as astronomical observations, laser fusion, and precision measurements, with an increasingly urgent demand for the fabrication of meter-scale gratings. Interference lithography (IL) offers the capability to produce high-quality gratings and holds significant potential for scaling up grating sizes. The stability of the exposure light field significantly affects the processing quality. Therefore, this paper proposes a fringe locking technique based on multiple reference gratings.
In the dual-beam interference lithography setup with large-aperture optics, a reference grating is used to monitor the exposure field. The reference fringes are recorded by a CCD camera, and the drift values are calculated using a cross-correlation method. These values are used to generate the control signals, which actuate the motion mechanisms to dynamically adjust the phase and period of interference field. However, relying on a single reference grating is insufficient to capture the conditions across the entire exposure field.
Therefore, we conducted an analysis of the errors across the entire exposure field and identified period error as the primary cause of this phenomenon. To address this, fringe patterns from two reference gratings are used to monitor periodic variations in the interference field. The feedback calculated by these variations is used to adjust the motion mechanism. altering the angle between the two beams to achieve periodic compensation. Experimental results show that after implementing periodic compensation, the fluctuation RMS of the interference fringes decreased from 0.24λ to 0.06λ, demonstrating significant improvement.
The laser interference lithography shows great potential in the field of sub-wavelength gratings which can be used for polarizer arrays. However, due to the difficulty in further reducing the wavelength of the laser source, the further reduction of the grating period is limited. A widely used method to reduce the minimum size of patterns is immersion lithography. Especially in the interference lithography, using the prism to reduce laser wavelength and grating period has been explored. However, total internal reflection between the prism and the photoresist layer on the wafer surface extraordinarily reduces the energy efficiency of the incident light, making it impossible to obtain interference stripes with smaller periods. This paper proposes a laser interference lithography combined with immersion lithography that can process the gratings with the smaller period and illustrates the principle. To achieve better processing quality, the constraint conditions that the prism bottom angle and the diameter of the laser beam should satisfy are obtained through calculation, which provides a theoretical basis for laser interference lithography combined with immersion lithography for processing the gratings with the smaller period.
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