Dear Nathan,

If you use FIB and concerned about edge roughness then beam deflection
performance(precision and resolution) is more important factor than
minimum beam size.
You probably know that already because you mentioned raster type scan
and all. So to minimize jagged edge you wanna reduce the "center to
center distance"(or pitch by FEI notation) as small as possible. Imagine
that if "center to center distance" is much larger than beam size than
you should see many dots instead of one line.

After optimizing this then additional etching technique can be applied
to reduce the roughness further such as plasma etch and wet etch.

You might want to etch away nano scale thin surface layer of your
structural material by using some enchant((Quartz--> HF). It will
smoothen the jagged edge.
If you use Si as structural layer then try use thermal oxidation
followed by HF etch. It is known method to smoothen the nano scale
scallop in the field of BOSCH process.

Also plasma etch(such as RIE) could give also positive effect to reduce
edge roughness.


Cho.

On 11/6/12 5:22 AM, Brian Stahl wrote:
> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Hosted by the MEMS and Nanotechnology Exchange, the country's leading
>> provider of MEMS and Nanotechnology design and fabrication services.
>> Visit us at http://www.mems-exchange.org
>>
>> Want to advertise to this community?  See http://www.memsnet.org
>>
>> To unsubscribe:
>> http://mail.mems-exchange.org/mailman/listinfo/mems-talk
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Hosted by the MEMS and Nanotechnology Exchange, the country's leading
> provider of MEMS and Nanotechnology design and fabrication services.
> Visit us at http://www.mems-exchange.org
>
> Want to advertise to this community?  See http://www.memsnet.org
>
> To unsubscribe:
> http://mail.mems-exchange.org/mailman/listinfo/mems-talk

_______________________________________________
Hosted by the MEMS and Nanotechnology Exchange, the country's leading
provider of MEMS and Nanotechnology design and fabrication services.
Visit us at http://www.mems-exchange.org

Want to advertise to this community?  See http://www.memsnet.org

To unsubscribe:
http://mail.mems-exchange.org/mailman/listinfo/mems-talk