Electron Beam Lithography - Charging

Charging

Since electrons are charged particles, they tend to charge the substrate negatively unless they can quickly gain access to a path to ground. For a high-energy beam incident on a silicon wafer, virtually all the electrons stop in the wafer where they can follow a path to ground. However, for a quartz substrate such as a photomask, the embedded electrons will take a much longer time to move to ground. Often the negative charge acquired by a substrate can be compensated or even exceeded by a positive charge on the surface due to secondary electron emission into the vacuum. The presence of a thin conducting layer above or below the resist is generally of limited use for high energy (50 keV or more) electron beams, since most electrons pass through the layer into the substrate. The charge dissipation layer is generally useful only around or below 10 keV, since the resist is thinner and most of the electrons either stop in the resist or close to the conducting layer. However, they are of limited use due to their high sheet resistance, which can lead to ineffective grounding.

The range of low-energy secondary electrons (the largest component of the free electron population in the resist-substrate system) which can contribute to charging is not a fixed number but can vary from 0 to as high as 50 nm (see section New frontiers in electron beam lithography and extreme ultraviolet lithography). Hence, resist-substrate charging is not repeatable and is difficult to compensate consistently. Negative charging deflects the electron beam away from the charged area while positive charging deflects the electron beam toward the charged area.