This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Objective: The objective of this grant application is to acquire an electron beam lithography (EBL) system to support nanofabrication research in the Houston metropolitan area. Houston is home to numerous research-intensive universities, the Texas Medical Center, and active industrial research. The system will be installed at the University of Houston, which houses the only shared fabrication resources in the Greater Houston area. This acquisition will build on the existing tool set and provide state-of-the-art nanofabrication capabilities to a broad user base, thereby elevating nanoscience research in Houston to a globally competitive level.
Intellectual Merit: Acquisition of a dedicated EBL system will enhance transformative research across a wide range of federally-funded materials and device programs, including nanomagnetic devices, biosensors, drug/gene delivery, resistive RAM, vertical electronic devices, chemically-amplified imaging materials, nanopantography, magnetic nanoconstrictions, nanowire interconnects, nanoscale light sources, nanomechanics, microfluidics, and nanostructured spintronic devices. The enabling EBL capabilities will stimulate development of new research programs.
Broader Impacts: The EBL acquisition will enhance the educational experience of more than 60 students at the University of Houston (UH), University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHSC), and Rice University. Team members will incorporate EBL training into educational programs at their home institutions, including Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship at Rice; Research Experiences for Undergraduates at UH and Rice; Research Experiences for Teachers at UH; Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate at UH and Rice; Awards to Stimulate and Support Undergraduate Research Education at Rice; and Nanotechnology Undergraduate Education at UH.
In the course of the project, the team has devoted significant effort to carefully evaluate several commercial dedicated electron beam lithography systems from several manufacturers to 1) meet required technical specifications, 2) appropriateness for the University environment (user-friendliness, maximized up time, and moderate maintenance costs), and 3) acquisition costs. The team has identified JEOL JBX 5500FS as the EBL system of choice. The system was acquired through the competitive bidding process and installed in the UH Nanofabrication Facility. The installation site was evaluated for environmental conditions (vibrations, noise, electromagnetic interference) and prepared for system installation including addition of vibration isolation slab, dedicated electrical grounding and power. JEOL JBX 5500FS electron beam lithography writer is installed in the University of Houston Nanofabrication Facility (http://nanofab.uh.edu/equipment/pattern-making/ebeam-writer) and readily available for users in the Greater Houston area to support their research projects. Today, a new user with no prior experience with electron beam lithography can be trained in approximately 2-3 hours to independently and consistently design and expose patterns with critical dimensions as low as 10 nm across a 3" wafer. This level of productivity is the result of an intuitive Windows based user interface, robust automated tool calibration routines and a meticulously designed standard operating procedure. The JBX-5500FS comes with somewhat limited support for data preparation. Additional capabilities are typically gained by adding one of the second party software package priced in the range of $70,000+ and high annual maintenance cost (+$10,000). We have chosen an alternative path of locally developing a software package to prepare data for the tool providing the following capabilities: Support for layouts containing more than 106 elements such as a large array of shapes Ability to define the position of a pattern with respect to a field to minimize distortion from lens aberration Ability to define the position of a field on a chip Ability to generate a layout with proximity effect compensation Ability to bias the layout Some error checking capabilities As we add more features to our in-house data preparation software, it is quite feasible to have a package with the core data preparation features approaching and even rivaling of commercial software. In summary, genuine electron-beam lithography capability is now available to a large back of users in the Greater Houston area, the sixth most populous in the country, and the home to numerous research-intensive universities, the Texas Medical Center, NASA, and active industrial research. Houston Universities receive more than $900M a year in federal funding for science and engineering research, and a significant percentage of these programs represent high-impact research in nanoscience. Electron-beam litghoraphy is among the key enabling tools to support nanoscience research.
