Electron beam lithography with negative tone resist for highly integrated silicon quantum bits

Process technologies have been developed for electron-beam (EB) lithography aimed at silicon quantum devices and their large-scale integration. It is necessary to understand the proximity effect and construct a method for its correction to perform EB lithography of fine and complicated structures. In this study, we investigate the lithography of Si quantum devices with a point-beam EB system and a maN 2401 negative tone resist, in order to correspond to various types of device structures. We optimize temperatures for specialized pre- and post-exposure bakes for forming ∼20 nm fine patterns with small line-edge roughness. Further, we demonstrated the fabrication of Si-on-insulator device patterns that have some tiny dots connected with many large wires/pads in the layout, with the careful tuning of the dose assignment. In this tuning, we used the EB process simulation to estimate the cumulative dose distribution effectively. In addition, we reproduced the experimentally obtained resist patterns via the EB process simulation after considering the mid-range effect, which is a factors in the proximity effect but is not yet deeply understood. The results of this study are expected to provide useful process technologies for EB lithography, which will help drastically accelerate the research on Si quantum devices with a high degree of freedom.