EBL opening up the nano-world

AbstractTremendous advances in lithography have spearheaded the shrinkage of device dimensions, playing a crucial role in the evolution of microelectronics. Although resist processing and etching are extremely important, advances in submicron structures are likely to be governed more by lithography than anything else. Electron beam lithography (EBL) is the best developed and most versatile high-resolution pattern-generation technique now available. This article discusses some recent applications of EBL in fabricating features in the nanometre scale, with a special emphasis on the fabrication of structures for applications in the exciting field of photonics and smart micro-optics