“Plasma Etching at the Nanoscale – Challenges for Patterned Media”

The move towards bit patterned media for hard drives is demanding lithographic solutions with resolution requirements far beyond that required for the semiconductor industry. Working at such high lithographic resolutions often requires thin, low selectivity resists whose patterns must be transferred with optimum fidelity. This often dictates the need for additional plasma processing steps which become more challenging as feature sizes shrink.

In this talk, I will discuss issues which must be overcome in dry etching at the nanoscale. We will survey examples of nanoscale pattern transfer work for hard disk manufacturing, microelectronics, imprint templates, optics and photonics. Detailed studies of mask effects will be discussed for imprint templates.