Exceptionally we present a new PMMA developer in the “Resist of the month” section today, because its potential possibilities will probably also inspire our users. This developer is a mixture of isopropanol and water – which may sound surprising at first, since both components individually do not attack PMMA layers.
Phoenix 81 was developed as part of a Eurostar project in cooperation with Swisslitho AG (now Heidelberg Instruments Nano). Using a NanoFrazor and thermal scanning probe lithography (t-SPL), structures as small as 10 nm can be written by dipping a hot needle into the resist layer and evaporating the resist at the tip (see also AR NEWS, 42nd issue).
Many companies meanwhile use the conductivity of Electra layers for their processes and technologies. Since its introduction on the market in 2018, synthesis and processing of Electra have continuously been improved. The conductivity of this resist could for example be increased by a factor of five between 2018 and 2020.
The successful evaluation of our development at one of our largest customers was the reason for us to select AR-N 4400-50 as resist of the month of July.
Resist CSAR 62 is meanwhile established worldwide, with continuously increasing demands. Since we manufacture the polymer by ourselves, we had to scale up polymer synthesis. First of all, CSAR 62 made the jump from laboratory scale to a 20-liter trailer.
We continued the development work on our new Atlas 46 photoresist also in 2021. Due to own results or recommendations and requests from our users, its formulation and properties were now improved.
In 2004, the first bottom resist (BR) was developed in collaboration with the Center for Intelligent Systems (CiS, Erfurt). This bottom resist is non-light sensitive and can be developed in an aqueous alkaline manner.
Optically dense resists play an increasingly important role in industry. So-called black resists are required in optical industry, in automotive industry (for headlights) and in the manufacture of rotary encoders.
Medusa 82 UV was already chosen as resist of the month in January 2019. Back then, we highly appreciated the first results for a use as photoresist. Shown are now results with respect to an application in grayscale lithography which were also presented at the MNE 2019 in Greece.
Allresist developed Phoenix 81 (AR-P 8100) within the scope of a Eurostars project together with SwissLitho AG and other partners. SwissLitho recently added a laser direct writer to the NanoFrazor device (see Fig. 1)