Nanolithography using Bessel Beams of Extreme Ultraviolet Wavelength

Bessel beams are nondiffracting light beams with large depth-of-focus and self-healing properties, making them suitable as a serial beam writing tool over surfaces with arbitrary topography. This property breaks the inherent resolution vs. depth-of-focus tradeoff of photolithography. One approach for their formation is to use circularly symmetric diffraction gratings. Such a ring grating was designed and fabricated for the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) wavelength of 13.5 nm, a candidate wavelength for future industrial lithography. Exposure of the aerial images showed that a Bessel beam with an approximately 1 mm long z-invariant central core of 223 nm diameter had been achieved, in good agreement with theory. Arbitrary patterns were written using the Bessel spot, demonstrating possible future application of Bessel beams for serial beam writing. Lithographic marks of ~30 nm size were also observed using a high resolution Bessel beam.