Proton beam micromachining: electron emission from SU-8 resist during ion beam irradiation

Proton beam micromachining (PBM) is a direct write lithographic technique that uses a focused beam of MeV protons to pattern a resist material. The most common resist material used in the PBM process is SU-8 which is usually spin coated onto various substrates. The method used to ensure that the correct dose is delivered to the sample during irradiation is Rutherford backscattering spectrometry (RBS). There are however limitations to using the RBS signal for normalizing the dose in highly sensitive resist materials such as SU-8. The limited number of backscatter events means that normalizing the dose for every pixel is not possible. The secondary electron yield for SU-8 is at least an order of magnitude higher than that for backscattered ions. With an appropriate detector these signals can be essentially used for ion detection and thus used to accurately monitor ion dose. In this paper we investigate the secondary electron yield from SU-8 polymer resist layers of varying thickness on silicon. It is shown that the signals produced during MeV ion irradiation can be directly related to the ion dose and used for dose normalization during PBM.