High speed e-beam lithography for gold nanoarray fabrication and use in nanotechnology

• Jorge Trasobares,
• François Vaurette,
• Marc François,
• Hans Romijn,
• Jean-Louis Codron,
• Dominique Vuillaume,
• Didier Théron and
• Nicolas Clément

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2014, 5, 1918–1925, doi:10.3762/bjnano.5.202

• ; high-speed e-beam lithography; molecular electronics; nanoarray; self-assembled monolayers; XPS; Introduction Well-ordered arrays of nanoparticles are already showing exciting applications in nanotechnology, including materials science [1][2][3][4][5], electronics [6][7][8][9][10], biology [11][12][13

• . In order to study more functional molecular junction (for example redox molecules), we need few mm-large gold nanoarray for chemical characterization with usual techniques such XPS. This requires high-speed e-beam lithography. We first describe the relevant e-beam operation mechanisms (Figure 1a

• techniques. Therefore, we plot in Figure 3a the estimated writing time as a function of nanoarray area for the four techniques. Whereas it would take 7 months for full wafer writing with the conventional method, it can take only ≈2 days with high-speed e-beam lithography. For molecular electronics