Dear Nathan,

I'm not a FIB expert but I have used an FEI Helios Dualbeam a little bit; I
think you should be able to defocus the ion beam slightly to blur/smooth
edges during patterning.  I would think that an isotropic chemical etch
after patterning would also smooth out some edge roughness (potentially at
the expense of overall resolution).  What feature size are you trying to
pattern that you're worried about LER?

Best regards,

Brian

--
Brian C. Stahl
Graduate Student Researcher
UCSB Materials Research Laboratory
brian.stahl@gmail.com / bstahl@mrl.ucsb.edu
Cell: (805) 748-5839
Office: MRL 3117A


On Sun, Nov 4, 2012 at 3:30 AM, Nathan McCorkle  wrote:

> I am working on microfluidics and have the opportunity to use an older FEI
> FIB. My concern this whole time has been to reduce jagged edges by not
> using a rastered master, originally I was thinking of building my own 405nm
> laser cutter that wouldn't pulse the beam while it traced my lines.
>
> With the FIB I'm thinking I could master gold-sputtered glass or quartz,
> then do contact lithography. Since the FIB does rastering, I'm again
> concerned with nanometer jaggies. Is there some way I can blur the
> lithography step a bit to smooth the edges? Or maybe make features smaller
> than they should be, then chemically etch the master for a brief time?
>
> --
> -Nathan
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