Parallel electron beam lithography

The following section reviews the field emission process and various field emission applications in which CNTs have found particular recognition, including displays, microwave and X-ray sources, parallel electron beam lithography systems, gas ionization sensors, and interstellar propulsion. 

Milne Wl, Teo KBK, ChhowaUa M, Amaratunga GAJ, Yuan J, Robertson J, et al. Investigating carbon materials for use as the electron emission source in a parallel electron-beam lithography system. Curr Appl Phys 2001 1 317-20. 

As a consequence one might expect that the future needs to rely on hybrid elements which arise from advanced UV-and electron-beam lithography, from imprint techniques or automated and parallelized nanomanipulation techniques, like dip-pen lithography or focused ion-beam techniques in combination with supramolecular approaches for the assembly of molecular inorganic/organic hybrid system. Nevertheless, it is evident for any kind of chemical approach that falling back onto the present-day... 

An alternative is to use electron beam lithography, whose basic resolution is of order 4 A. However, e-beam lithography is a serial addressing system, rather than a parallel system, so that we must write a 2D image as a series of lines, rather than a 2D pattern, and this takes a much longer time. 

To increase printing rates an idea is to develop parallel e-beam lithography [36,50-56]. This would use electrically addressable two-dimensional arrays of electron sources. Each source would be a field emitter inside a CMOS control element. The electron sources in this case are quite complex, having not only grids but also focusing electrodes [36],... 

In the course of our research on organic metals, we discovered that certain of these materials can function as electron-beam resists for high resolution lithography with a combination of unique features that have no parallel among conventional resist materials. ... 

Figure 4 Schematic illustration of ordering parallel arrays of cylindrical domains, (a) Disordered domains on a flat substrate, (b) Grating patterns prepared by electron-beam (e-beam) lithography and reactive ion etching, (c) Ordering of confined block copolymers in the troughs, (d) Alignment of microdomains above and beyond the confined volumes of the troughs.

Microdrawing techniques of stacked capillaries are mainly used to manufacture optical elements. Nanochannel glass has been used to produce a mask, which was applied in massive parallel patterned lithography (Tonucci et al., [522,523]). Multi-microcapillary systems are also used in optical applications, for instance, to focus X-ray beams [553]. Beloglazov et al. [41] described that apart in X-ray optics drawn stacked microcapillaries have foimd applications as parts of microactuators used in micromechanics, filters in bio and medicine technical applications, light guiding elements and photonic crystals and also for visualisation systems in electronics. 

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