From omelet lithography to state-of-the-art performance resists: resist screening with EUV Interference Lithography

As EUV lithography becomes the new standard for electronic chip manufacturing, identifying suitable materials for higher resolution patterning stands out as a prominent challenge for reaching future technology nodes. Innovative approaches to patterning are becoming more and more relevant as standardly used photoresists approach their limitations. In this work we use the highly-flexible EUV-Interference Lithography tool at PSI for screening of materials. We highlight the EUV lithography exposure mechanism of secondary electron chemistry and its versatility in inducing a solubility switch in photoresists by using a chicken egg-white albumin protein cluster as a photosensitive material to obtain sub-100 nm patterns. Moving from these novel EUV lithography results, we show recent high-resolution highlights obtained towards the patterning of sub-10 nm features.