Whether you are investigating magnetic properties of novel materials on nanometer scale or wanting to observe how cells behave when they are forced to live on a surface with nanometer scale corrugations the bottleneck is often producing high-resolution patterns over sufficiently large areas.
Optical microscope image of a large area nano-grating sample. The image was taken in a polarized light mode where linear nano-gratings appear bright and colorful. Each rectangle in the image is a 1.2 mm x 0.5 mm linear grating with 35 nm half-pitch. The total patterned area is 12.6 mm2. The diagonal lines in the figure are due to the stitching of multiple microscope images.
Accomplishing this task with conventional tools such as e-beam lithography quickly becomes unaffordable when areas larger than a mere square-millimeter are needed. Eulitha’s unique EUV-IL technology provides the solution thanks to its high throughput. Our engineers have recently demonstrated this capability by step-and-repeat exposures to cover large areas according to customer specifications (see image).
This nano-grating pattern would have taken up to 10 hours to write with a state-of-the-art e-beam tool. The successful exposures also proved the reproducibility of the exposure process. Armed with the newly upgraded EUV-IL tool Eulitha is looking forward to fulfill customers’ requests for even larger area nano-patterns.
EULITHA was founded in 2006 in the canton Aargau of Switzerland. Its founders have played critical roles in the development of Extreme Ultraviolet Interference Technology at the Paul Scherrer Institut. The company aims to serve nano-structuring needs of targeted applications through this breakthrough technology. At present, it provides products as samples for nanotechnology R&D.