A simple electron-beam lithography system

A large number of applications of electron-beam lithography (EBL) systems in nanotechnology have been demonstrated in recent years. In this paper we present a simple and general-purpose EBL system constructed by insertion of an electrostatic deflector plate system at the electron-beam exit of the column of a scanning electron microscope (SEM). The system can easily be mounted on most standard SEM systems. The tested setup allows an area of up to about 50×50 μm to be scanned, if the upper limit for acceptable reduction of the SEM resolution is set to 10 nm. We demonstrate how the EBL system can be used to write three-dimensional nanostructures by electron-beam deposition.