Hello all, I am trying to uniformly cover the top, bottom and sidewalls of a ridge. The ridge has vertical sidewalls and it would be around 1.5-3um tall and about 2-50um wide. The only equipment that we can use for this is an e-beam metal deposition system (i.e, no sputtering, no electroplating). We have fitted the e-beam system with a rocking stage to facilitate uniform coverage of this ridge. The rocking motion can be programmed to do virtually any sequence we want. We have the stage programmed right now for rocking the sample to +/-45o with a stop (wait time) at both ends of 1sec. Although the metal covers the ridge, shadowing effects prevent the metal from covering it uniformly all around -- especially near corners. Clearly, this simple sequence is not the best. Since gold is quite expensive and these experiments require about 1-2um of gold, I was wondering if any of you have done this and is willing to share this knowledge with the group. Finally, do you know of any software that could simulate this type of process? Thanks in advance! P. Barrios