Design of a beamline for soft and deep lithography on third generation synchrotron radiation source

ELETTRA is a third generation synchrotron radiation source. The energy spec trum allows the design of beamlines suitable for x-ray lithography from sof t to hard x-ray wavelengths. An appropriate lithographic window for micro- and nanofabrication can be obtained by a combination of selected filters an d mirrors. As the beamline is interfaced to a vertical x-ray stepper, a uni formity in the beam intensity better than 3% (3 sigma) in the horizontal di rection has to be reached. The present beamline is designed by taking into account the main factors which can affect the beam quality, namely, thermal loading on mirrors and filters, slope errors, and surface roughness of the mirrors. The resulting lithographic resolution at soft x-ray wavelengths i s better than 100 nm. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S0034-6748(9 9)02303-5].