Akım kontrollü, alan salımlı taramalı sonda litografisinde çizgi kenar pürüzlülüğünün incelenmesi: imge tersinimi ile doğrudan yazmanın karşılaştırılması

Current-controlled field-emission scanning probe lithography offers unique capabilities to achieve sub-10 nm feature sizes with a high resolution in ambient conditions without any vacuum or special gas requirements. Patterned features can be scanned directly after the exposure using the same exposure setup and tip. With linewidths thus reduced from microns to nanometers, the line edge roughness has recently become even more important, since it does not scale with the decreasing feature size having a direct effect on the critical dimension of the printed features, thereupon, also on the speed and functionality of fabricated devices. For this purpose, lines patterned with a 200-nm nominal pitch through direct-write in scanning probe lithography are compared to those obtained by image reversal. Negative-tone exposure before development (latent image) is also considered thanks to the resolving power of imaging through non-contact AFM mode and used for validation purposes. Images collected are analyzed using edge detection techniques with the average linewidths for image reversal and direct-write found to be 50.01 nm and 26.81 nm, respectively. We report 16.44 nm average line edge roughness for the latent image, 16.78 nm for image reversal and 10.95 nm for direct-write. Presenting a thorough comparison of patterning through image reversal of calixarene molecular glass resist from negative-tone to positive-tone as well as direct-write, this thesis discusses various aspects of the quality of resulting patterns.