Publikationsrepositorium - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

The aim of nanofabrication is to create structures and devices with minimum dimensions lower than 100 nm. There are two main nanofabrication approaches, bottom-up and top-down. In the former, the structures and devices are created from small to large in an additive fashion, which relies to a great extent on self-organisation processes. In the latter, the fabrication goes from large to small where nanostructures and devices are carved from a larger piece of material in a subtractive fashion. It is much more mature than the bottom-up approach and is based on two long-established processes: (i) nanolithography, where a stencil with the required pattern is created in a sacrificial layer called “resist”, deposited on the main working material, and (ii) pattern transfer through the resist stencil into the base material.

In the present paper we will present results on high-resolution nanofabrication of structures and devices with critical dimensions (CD) below 10 nm on silicon (Si), silicon-on-insulator (SOI), germanium (Ge) and germanium-on-insulator (GeOI) substrates. The fabrication was mainly within the frames of the top-down approach and was based on electron beam lithography (EBL) with positive and negative resists followed by a pattern transfer with both additive (metal deposition and lift-off) and subtractive (dry etching) methods. Moreover, high-end results on combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches will also be presented such as (i) contacting of bottom-up grown and randomly distributed nanostructures and fabrication of devices out of them as well as (ii) pattern density multiplication by directed self assembly (DSA) of block-copolymers (BCP). We believe that these results are showing some of the promising trends for future development of high-resolution nanofabrication.