Dose control circuit for digital electrostatic electron-beam array lithography

This paper demonstrates a technique for controlling the electron emission of an array of field emitting vertically aligned carbon nanofibers (VACNFs). An array of carbon nanofibers (CNF) is to be used as the source of electron beams for lithography purposes. This tool is intended to replace the mask in the conventional photolithography process by controlling their charge emission using the “Dose Control Circuitry” (DCC). The large variation in the charge emitted between CNFs grown in identical conditions forced the controller design to be based on fixed dose rather than on fixed time. Compact digital control logic has been designed for controlling the operation of DCC. This system has been implemented in a 0.5 μm CMOS process. Chandra Sekhar A. Durisety received his B.E. (Hons.) Instrumentation from Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences, Pilani, India in 1997 and his M.S in Electrical Engineering from University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2002. Since 2003, he has been working towards his Ph.D degree also in Electrical Engineering at Integrated Circuits and Systems Lab (ICASL), University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He joined Wipro Infotech Ltd, Global R & D, Bangalore, India in 1997, where he designed FPGA based IPs for network routers. Since 1999, he was involved in the PCI bridge implementation at CMOS chips Inc, Santa Clara, CA, and the test bench development for Sony’s MP3 player, while at Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc., San Jose, CA. His research interests include multi-stage amplifiers, data converters, circuits in SOI and Floating Gate Devices. Rajagopal Vijayaraghavan received the B.E degree in electronics and communication engineering from Madras University in 1998 and the M.S degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas, Dallas in 2001.He is currently working towards the Ph.D degree in electrical engineering at the University of Tennessee. His research interest is in the area of CMOS Analog and RF IC design. His current research focuses on LNAs and VCOs using SOI based MESFET devices. Lakshmipriya Seshan was born in Trivandrum, India on April 30, 1979. She received her B.tech in Electronincs & Communication Engg from Kerala University, India in June 2000 and M.S in Electrical Engg from University of Tennessee in 2004. In 2004, she joined Intel Corporation as an Analog Engineer, where she is engaged in the design of low power, high speed analog circuits for various I/O interface topologies. Syed K. Islam received his B.Sc. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) and M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Systems Engineering from the University of Connecticut. He is presently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dr. Islam is leading the research efforts of the Analog VLSI and Devices Laboratory at the University of Tennessee. His research interests are design, modeling and fabrication of microelectronic/optoelectronic devices, molecular scale electronics and nanotechnology, biomicroelectronics and monolithic sensors. Dr. Islam has numerous publications in technical journals and conference proceedings in the areas of semiconductors devices and circuits. Benjamin J. Blalock received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1991 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, also in electrical engineering, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 1993 and 1996 respectively. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Tennessee where he directs the Integrated Circuits and Systems Laboratory (ICASL). His research focus there includes analog IC design for extreme environments (both wide temperature and radiation immune), multi-gate transistors and circuits on SOI, body-driven circuit techniques for ultra low-voltage analog, mixed-signal/mixed-voltage circuit design for systems-on-a-chip, and bio-microelectronics. Dr. Blalock has co-authored over 60 published refereed papers. He has also worked as an analog IC design consultant for Cypress Semiconductor Corp. and Concorde Microsystems Inc.