COMMUNICATION
(1 of 8)charged-particle beam lithography technique, has shown great potential in 3D nanoscale fabrication with high precision at the submicron scale. 3D nanofabrication has been demonstrated using low-energy EBL based on the saturation of exposure depth and width, [24] multiple electron beam exposures at different exposure energies, [20,25] continuous overlay electron beam exposures, [26][27][28] and grayscale EBL [29,30] among others. To the same end, 3D nanostructures have also been fabricated in bilayer resist stacks by EBL, [31] which was enabled by the difference in dose sensitivity of two different resists. However, in this approach, multiple coatings of resists with different sensitivities are required. Moreover, there is a limited selection of suitable combinations of high-resolution resists. The recently introduced scanning helium ion microscope (HIM) is a superior tool in high-resolution imaging, thanks to its minimized sample charging through flood charge neutralization, enhanced depth of field, and short De Broglie wavelength. As a scanning focused-ion-beam instrument, HIM can perform high-resolution nanofabrication by milling, [32,33] etching, [34] deposition, [35,36] modification of materials, [37,38] and lithographic patterning in resists. [39,40] When used as a high-resolution lithography tool, helium ion beam lithography (HIBL) has achieved record-high-resolution patterning of 8 nm pitch dense lines. [41] Moreover, the narrow interaction volume of helium ions in resist materials makes HIBL a promising candidate for In this paper, 3D volumetric energy deposition and local crosslinking of hydrogen silsesquioxane (HSQ) are experimentally and numerically explored in focused helium ion beam lithography (HIBL). In particular, a throughmembrane exposure method is developed to make visible and subsequently to measure the 3D interaction volume and energy deposition of helium ions in HSQ. By comparing the actual dimensions of the crosslinked HSQ structures with Monte Carlo modeling of the spatial distribution of the energy deposition, the critical energy density for crosslinking HSQ is obtained. Finally, 3D nanofabrication of complex crosslinked HSQ nanostructures such as embedded nanochannels and suspended grids is demonstrated using two different exposure configurations. The proposed method expands the 2D point spread function of HIBL into three dimensions, thus opening a new avenue for nanoscale 3D fabrication.
Helium Ion Beam LithographyThe ORCID identification number(s) for the author(s) of this article can be found under https://doi.org/10.1002/admi.201800203.3D micro/nanostructures are important for electronic, [1] photonic, [2] plasmonic, [3] microfluidic, [4] bio-MEMS, [5] and chemical synthesis [6] applications. Directly patterning materials into 3D micro/nanostructures has recently attracted considerable attention. Significant effort has been devoted to investigating methods for defining functional 3D micro/nanoscale structures, including direct material deposition, [7][8][9][10] ...