Cho,
I would have to find out the magnification (or zoom) level vs pitch, but
yeah basically finding that sweet spot of beam spot size and dot pitch
should work I think.

Thanks for the etch tips too!

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 6:13 PM, MRC gmail  wrote:

> 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
>>> ______________________________**_________________
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>
> ______________________________**_________________
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--
-Nathan
_______________________________________________
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