Wide area soft vacuum abnormal glow electron beam discharge hardening process
AssigneeApplied Electron Corporation
InventorsGeorge J. Collins, Jayaram Krishnaswamy
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A process for large area hardening of photoresists or polymer films placed on substrates is disclosed. The process requires the use of a short duration (<1 us.) pulsed electron beam produced in soft vacuum by an abnormal glow discharge. The pulsed electron beam interacts with the patterned photoresist/polymer resist so as to harden or stabilize the patterns thereon by electron induced cross-linking. The use of a soft vacuum environment allows for both thermal as well as chemically induced hardening.
Claims17
A resist hardening process for hardening a previously patterned resist layer on a substrate, the process comprising:
- positioning a substrate having a previously patterned resist layer thereon in a vacuum chamber;
- evacuating the vacuum chamber with a selected gas to a selected pressure level;
- producing a wide area pulsed abnormal glow electron beam discharge from a cold cathode abnormal glow discharge electron gun positioned within the vacuum chamber, said pulsed abnormal glow electron beam discharge being pulsed from a first current level to a higher second current level;
- and
- exposing the previously patterned resist layer on the substrate to the wide area pulsed abnormal glow electron beam discharge for a predetermined number of pulses.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.