Lei Lihua

Fabrication and measurement of traceable pitch standard with a big area at trans-scale

Atom lithography with chromium can be utilized to fabricate a pitch standard, which is directly traceable to the wavelength of the laser standing waves. The result of a calibrated commercial AFM measurement demonstrates that the pitch standard is (212.8±0.1) nm with a peak-to-valley-height (PTVH) better than 20 nm. The measurement results show the high period accuracy of traceability with the standing laser wavelength (λ/2 = 212.78 nm). The Cr nano-grating covers a 1000 μm×500 μm area, with a PTVH better than 10 nm. The feature width broadening of the Cr nanostructure has been experimentally observed along the direction of the standing waves. The PTVH along the Gaussian laser direction is similar to a Gaussian distribution. Highly uniform periodic nanostructures with a big area at the millimeter scale, and the surface growth uniformity of the Cr nano-grating, show its great potential in the application of a traceable pitch standard at trans-scales.

Nano-Traceability Study of a Cr Standard Grating Fabricated by Laser-Focused Atomic Deposition

A dimensional artifact is developed, which is a chromium (Cr) deposition grating fabricated by a laser-focused atomic deposition technique. The mean pitch of the grating is measured by using a metrological atomic force microscope with a large range, where a series of reference signs have been performed to locate the deposition area. Cosine error of the measurement result is analyzed and eliminated by the iterative angle calibration. The measurement result shows that the mean pitch of the grating is 212.66 ± 0.02 nm, which is very close to half of the standing laser wavelength (λ = 425.55 nm). This means that the grating has traceability with high accuracy and can substitute the laser interference technology for instrument calibration. Moreover, using the Cr deposition grating as a nano standard can shorten the traceability chain and improve the practical application.

Development of MEMS-based micro capacitive tactile probe

In this paper, a micro capacitive sensor with nanometer resolution is presented for ultra-precision measurement of micro components, which is fabricated by the MEMS (micro electromechanical systems) non-silicon technique. Based on the sensor, a micro capacitive tactile probe is constructed by stylus assembly and packaging design for dimension metrology on micro/nano scale, in which a data acquiring system is developed with AD7747. Some measurements of the micro capacitive tactile probe are performed on a nano positioning and measuring machine (NMM). The measurement results show good linearity and hysteresis with a range of 11.6 μm and resolution of better than 5 nm. Hence, the micro capacitive tactile probe can be integrated on NMM to realize measurement of micro structures with nanometer accuracy.