| Research Abstract |
In the 21^<st> century, micro and nanofabrication technique has become important to realize electronic micro devices such as high density memory and liquid crystal display. In the lithography process, particularly, photoresist is regarded as an important mask material for dry or wet etching processes. However, improvement of the adhesion strength of the resist micropattern has been recognized as one serious problem to be solved, because the pattern collapse during water rinsing in the pattern development process occurs drastically due to Laplace force. In these days, various studies on adhesive phenomena of photoresist material have been accomplished by several researchers. A great deal of effort has been made on monitoring the adhesive property. What seems to be lacking, however, is quantitative and direct analysis physically. Meanwhile, with the invention of the atomic force microscope (AFM), we have been equipped in good time with the appropriate tools to understand the physical pro
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perties of condensed matter on a nanometer scale. As mentioned above, with the increasing degree of miniaturization in microelectronics, we unquestionably become confronted with structures of matter on a scale below 100 nm. In this regard, the investigator has already proposed the novel principle for direct analysis method for resist pattern adhesion, that is, direct peeling with the AFM tip (DPAT). In this study, by this method, the dependency of the load for collapse of the resist micropattern on heating temperature and linewidth are shown. Understanding these collapse property is of crucial importance for development not only microelectronic device but device in nanometer scale. Moreover, collapse and fracture mechanism of the resist line-pattern of 100 nm width formed by the KrF-excimer laser lithography are characterized by the DPAT method. Particularly, loading position dependency of pattern collapse and fracture mechanism are mainly focused. The DPAT method in this study can be applied to an ArF resist pattern, electron beam and synchrotron radiation resist patterns less than 70nm in width. Moreover, this technique will give useful information to other fields, for example, condensation control of micro particles and structural design for micro machine and so on. Less
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