Nanofabrication of high aspect ratio structures using an evaporated resist containing metal

Organic electron beam resists are typically not resistant to the plasma etching employed to transfer the pattern into the underlying layer. Here, the authors present the incorporation of a metal hard mask material into negative resist polystyrene by co-evaporation of the polystyrene and the metal onto a substrate. With a volume ratio of 1:15 between Cr and polystyrene, this nanocomposite resist showed an etching selectivity to silicon one order higher than pure polystyrene resist. Silicon structures of 100 nm width and 3.5 μm height (aspect ratio 1:35) were obtained using a non-switching deep silicon etching recipe with SF6 and C4F8 gas. Moreover, unlike the common spin coating method, evaporated nanocomposite resist can be coated onto irregular and non-flat surfaces such as optical fibers and AFM cantilevers. As a proof of concept, we fabricated high aspect ratio structures on top of an AFM cantilever. Nanofabrication on non-flat surfaces may find applications in the fields of (AFM) tip enhanced Raman spectroscopy for chemical analysis and lab-on-fiber technology.