The Assembly of a Fully Functional Microcolumn and Its STEM-Mode Operation

Comparison of Electron Emission Characteristics of W and CNT Field Emitter for Microcolumn

“…Usually, in a microcolumn, the aperture diameter of extractor, accelerating electrode and limiting electrode is 2.5, 100 and 2.5 µm, respectively. Sometimes, the microcolumns designed with three source lens electrodes having relatively larger aperture diameter of 100 µm have been reported and showed good results in the SEM mode operation [10]. Therefore, we assembled microcolumns based on this design for the simpler assembly of test microcolumns.…”

Arrayed microcolumn operation with a wafer-scale Einzel lens

“…1(b) has been fabricated using an advanced micro-lens fabrication technique and the details can be found elsewhere [8]. The lens components were assembled using a precise alignment method based on laser diffraction patterns through circular apertures instead of the conventional alignment method [5]. For the ideal alignment of 12 Einzel lenses, laser alignment method with double laser beam was employed and proved to be satisfactory.…”

“…Recently, microcolumn was demonstrated as a promising technology for the next generation lithography with high resolution and high throughput capabilities [1][2][3][4][5][6]. The experimental result achieved with a 1 keV low-energy microcolumn proved the probe beam diameter of 10 nm with a beam current of $1 nA at a working distance of 1 mm [1].…”

Experimental Study on the Operation of a Keyhole-Shaped Lens in a Microcolumn

“…The circular aperture components were constructed using MEMS technology on about 3 μm thin Si membrane. The details of construction of such circular einzel lens components can be found elsewhere [9]. The keyhole-shaped apertures are made by overlapping a rectangular aperture of 150 μm × 250 μm on a circular aperture of 200 μm-diameter as showing in Figure 2(b).…”