Efficient E-beam lithography exposure strategies for diffractive X-ray optics

Exposure of structures with rotational symmetry by means of electron beam lithography is not trivial, because the e-beam writers are usually designed to deal with the data defined in Cartesian coordinates. Fabrication of circular nanostructures like Fresnel zone plates (FZPs) for x-ray microscopy applications requires exposures with resolution well below 1 nm. Therefore, special attention has to be paid to the efficient exposure data preparation, which will guarantee required precision and allow keeping the exposure time low. In this article, we describe in detail an optimized strategy that was applied for exposure of FZPs by the Vistec EBPG5000Plus e-beam lithography tool. Direct programming of exposure files allowed us to use fully the capabilities of this e-beam writer to expose efficiently and reproducibly FZPs with desired characteristics in both positive and negative tone resists.