Multibeam electron source for nanofabrication using electron beam induced deposition

A multibeam electron beam induced deposition (EBID) system is presented, which can be used for the fabrication of sub-10 nm structures with EBID. This system consists of a scanning electron microscope (SEM) column and a modified source section with a microfabricated lens array. This lens array produces 100 virtual sources that are imaged demagnified onto a wafer to obtain an array of 1 nm probes, which is one order of magnitude lower than reported previously on single-column multibeam systems. In this paper, results are presented of tests on the first prototype, showing the functioning of the microlens array.