Cynthia B. Brooks

Step and flash imprint lithography for manufacturing patterned media

The ever-growing demand for hard drives with greater storage density has motivated a technology shift from continuous magnetic media to patterned media hard disks, which are expected to be implemented in future generations of hard disk drives to provide data storage at densities exceeding 1012 bits/in.2. Step and flash imprint lithography (S-FIL) technology has been employed to pattern the hard disk substrates. This article discusses the infrastructure required to enable S-FIL in high-volume manufacturing, namely, fabrication of master templates, template replication, high-volume imprinting with precisely controlled residual layers, and dual-sided imprinting. Imprinting of disks is demonstrated with substrate throughput currently as high as 180 disks/h (dual sided). These processes are applied to patterning hard disk substrates with both discrete tracks and bit-patterned designs.

Design and early performance of IGRINS (Immersion Grating Infrared Spectrometer)

The Immersion Grating Infrared Spectrometer (IGRINS) is a compact high-resolution near-infrared cross-dispersed spectrograph whose primary disperser is a silicon immersion grating. IGRINS covers the entire portion of the wavelength range between 1.45 and 2.45μm that is accessible from the ground and does so in a single exposure with a resolving power of 40,000. Individual volume phase holographic (VPH) gratings serve as cross-dispersing elements for separate spectrograph arms covering the H and K bands. On the 2.7m Harlan J. Smith telescope at the McDonald Observatory, the slit size is 1ʺ x 15ʺ and the plate scale is 0.27ʺ pixel. The spectrograph employs two 2048 x 2048 pixel Teledyne Scientific and Imaging HAWAII-2RG detectors with SIDECAR ASIC cryogenic controllers. The instrument includes four subsystems; a calibration unit, an input relay optics module, a slit-viewing camera, and nearly identical H and K spectrograph modules. The use of a silicon immersion grating and a compact white pupil design allows the spectrograph collimated beam size to be only 25mm, which permits a moderately sized (0.96m x 0.6m x 0.38m) rectangular cryostat to contain the entire spectrograph. The fabrication and assembly of the optical and mechanical components were completed in 2013. We describe the major design characteristics of the instrument including the system requirements and the technical strategy to meet them. We also present early performance test results obtained from the commissioning runs at the McDonald Observatory.

High volume jet and flash imprint lithography for discrete track patterned media

The Jet and Flash Imprint Lithography (J-FIL) process uses drop dispensing of UV curable resists for high resolution patterning. Several applications, including patterned media, are better, and more economically served by a full substrate patterning process since the alignment requirements are minimal. Patterned media is particularly challenging because of the aggressive feature sizes necessary to achieve storage densities required for manufacturing beyond the current technology of perpendicular recording. In this paper, the key process steps for the application of J-FIL to pattern media fabrication are reviewed with special attention to the vapor adhesion layer and imprint performance at >300 disk per hour.

Jet and flash imprint lithography for the fabrication of patterned media drives

The ever-growing demand for hard drives with greater storage density has motivated a technology shift from continuous magnetic media to patterned media hard disks, which are expected to be implemented in future generations of hard disk drives to provide data storage at densities exceeding 1012 bits per square inch. Jet and Flash Imprint Lithography (J-FILTM) technology has been employed to pattern the hard disk substrates. This paper discusses the infrastructure required to enable J-FIL in high-volume manufacturing; namely, fabrication of master templates, template replication, high-volume imprinting with precisely controlled residual layers, dual-sided imprinting and defect inspection. Imprinting of disks is demonstrated with substrate throughput currently as high as 180 disks/hour (dual-sided). These processes are applied to patterning hard disk substrates with both discrete tracks and bit-patterned designs.

High density patterned media fabrication using Jet and Flash Imprint Lithography

The Jet and Flash Imprint Lithography (J-FIL®) process uses drop dispensing of UV curable resists for high resolution patterning. Several applications, including patterned media, are better, and more economically served by a full substrate patterning process since the alignment requirements are minimal. Patterned media is particularly challenging because of the aggressive feature sizes necessary to achieve storage densities required for manufacturing beyond the current technology of perpendicular recording. In this paper, the key process steps for the application of J-FIL to pattern media fabrication are reviewed with special attention to substrate cleaning, vapor adhesion of the adhesion layer and imprint performance at >300 disk per hour. Also discussed are recent results for imprinting discrete track patterns at half pitches of 24nm and bit patterned media patterns at densities of 1 Tb/in2.

Minimizing linewidth roughness for 22-nm node patterning with step-and-flash imprint lithography

Imprint lithography achieves high resolution patterning with low roughness by avoiding the tradeoff between pattern quality and process throughput - a tradeoff that limits the capability of photolithography with chemically amplified resists. This work demonstrates the use of ZEP520A electron-beam resist for fabrication of imprint masks (templates). It is shown that high resolution, low roughness patterns can be robustly transferred from imprint mask to imprint resist, and from imprint resist through etch transfer into the underlying substrate. Through improvements to the electron-beam patterning process, 22 nm half-pitch patterns are routinely achieved with linewidth roughness (LWR) of just 2.6 nm, 3σ

Capturing Complete Spatial Context in Satellite Observations of Greenhouse Gases

Scientific consensus from a 2015 pre-Decadal Survey workshop highlighted the essential need for a wide-swath (mapping) low earth orbit (LEO) instrument delivering carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and carbon monoxide (CO) measurements with global coverage. OCO-2 pioneered space-based CO2 remote sensing, but lacks the CH4, CO and mapping capabilities required for an improved understanding of the global carbon cycle. The Carbon Balance Observatory (CARBO) advances key technologies to enable high-performance, cost-effective solutions for a space-based carbon-climate observing system. CARBO is a compact, modular, 15-30° field of view spectrometer that delivers high-precision CO2, CH4, CO and solar induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) data with weekly global coverage from LEO. CARBO employs innovative immersion grating technologies to achieve diffraction-limited performance with OCO-like spatial (2x2 km2) and spectral (λ/Δλ ≈ 20,000) resolution in a package that is >50% smaller, lighter and more cost-effective. CARBO delivers a 25- to 50-fold increase in spatial coverage compared to OCO-2 with no loss of detection sensitivity. Individual CARBO modules weigh < 20 kg, opening diverse new space-based platform opportunities.

High performance Si immersion gratings patterned with electron beam lithography

Infrared spectrographs employing silicon immersion gratings can be significantly more compact than spectro- graphs using front-surface gratings. The Si gratings can also offer continuous wavelength coverage at high spectral resolution. The grooves in Si gratings are made with semiconductor lithography techniques, to date almost entirely using contact mask photolithography. Planned near-infrared astronomical spectrographs require either finer groove pitches or higher positional accuracy than standard UV contact mask photolithography can reach. A collaboration between the University of Texas at Austin Silicon Diffractive Optics Group and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Microdevices Laboratory has experimented with direct writing silicon immersion grating grooves with electron beam lithography. The patterning process involves depositing positive e-beam resist on 1 to 30 mm thick, 100 mm diameter monolithic crystalline silicon substrates. We then use the facility JEOL 9300FS e-beam writer at JPL to produce the linear pattern that defines the gratings. There are three key challenges to produce high-performance e-beam written silicon immersion gratings. (1) E- beam field and subfield stitching boundaries cause periodic cross-hatch structures along the grating grooves. The structures manifest themselves as spectral and spatial dimension ghosts in the diffraction limited point spread function (PSF) of the diffraction grating. In this paper, we show that the effects of e-beam field boundaries must be mitigated. We have significantly reduced ghost power with only minor increases in write time by using four or more field sizes of less than 500 μm. (2) The finite e-beam stage drift and run-out error cause large-scale structure in the wavefront error. We deal with this problem by applying a mark detection loop to check for and correct out minuscule stage drifts. We measure the level and direction of stage drift and show that mark detection reduces peak-to-valley wavefront error by a factor of 5. (3) The serial write process for typical gratings yields write times of about 24 hours- this makes prototyping costly. We discuss work with negative e-beam resist to reduce the fill factor of exposure, and therefore limit the exposure time. We also discuss the tradeoffs of long write-time serial write processes like e-beam with UV photomask lithography. We show the results of experiments on small pattern size prototypes on silicon wafers. Current prototypes now exceed 30 dB of suppression on spectral and spatial dimension ghosts compared to monochromatic spectral purity measurements of the backside of Si echelle gratings in reflection at 632 nm. We perform interferometry at 632 nm in reflection with a 25 mm circular beam on a grating with a blaze angle of 71.6°. The measured wavefront error is 0.09 waves peak to valley.

New metrology techniques improve the production of silicon diffractive optics

Silicon immersion gratings and grisms offer significant advantages in compactness and performance over frontsurface gratings and over grisms made from lower-index materials. At the same time, the high refractive index of Si (3.4) leads to very stringent constraints on the allowable groove position errors, typically rms < 20 nm over 100 mm and repetitive error of <5 nm amplitude. For both types of devices, we produce grooves in silicon using photolithography, plasma etching, and wet etching. To date, producers have used contact photolithography to pattern UV sensitive photoresist as the initial processing step, then transferred this pattern to a layer of silicon nitride that, in turn, serves as a hard mask during the wet etching of grooves into silicon. For each step of the groove production, we have used new and sensitive techniques to determine the contribution of that step to the phase non-uniformity. Armed with an understanding of the errors and their origins, we could then implement process controls for each step. The plasma uniformity was improved for the silicon nitride mask etch process and the phase contribution of the plasma etch step was measured. We then used grayscale lithography, a technique in which the photoresist is deliberately underexposed, to measure large-scale nonuniformities in the UV exposure system to an accuracy of 3-5%, allowing us to make corrections to the optical alignment. Additionally, we used a new multiple-exposure technique combined with laser interferometry to measure the relationship between UV exposure dose and line edge shift. From these data we predict the contribution of the etching and photolithographic steps to phase error of the grating surface. These measurements indicate that the errors introduced during the exposure step dominate the contributions of all the other processing steps. This paper presents the techniques used to quantify individual process contributions to phase errors and steps that were taken to improve overall phase uniformity.

Linewidth roughness characterization in step and flash imprint lithography

Despite the remarkable progress made in extending optical lithography to deep sub-wavelength imaging, the limit for the technology seems imminent. At 22nm half pitch design rules, neither very high NA tools (NA 1.6), nor techniques such as double patterning are likely to be sufficient. One of the key challenges in patterning features with these dimensions is the ability to minimize feature roughness while maintaining reasonable process throughput. This limitation is particularly challenging for electron and photon based NGL technologies, where fast chemically amplified resists are used to define the patterned images. Control of linewidth roughness (LWR) is critical, since it adversely affects device speed and timing in CMOS circuits. Imprint lithography has been included on the ITRS Lithography Roadmap at the 32 and 22 nm nodes. This technology has been shown to be an effective method for replication of nanometer-scale structures from a template (imprint mask). As a high fidelity replication process, the resolution of imprint lithography is determined by the ability to create a master template having the required dimensions. Although the imprint process itself adds no additional linewidth roughness to the patterning process, the burden of minimizing LWR falls to the template fabrication process. Non chemically amplified resists, such as ZEP520A, are not nearly as sensitive but have excellent resolution and can produce features with very low LWR. The purpose of this paper is to characterize LWR for the entire imprint lithography process, from template fabrication to the final patterned substrate. Three experiments were performed documenting LWR in the template, imprint, and after pattern transfer. On average, LWR was extremely low (less than 3nm, 3σ), and independent of the processing step and feature size.