Study of chemically amplified resist using an electron beam recorder

A user data capacity of more than 23 Gbytes (GB) is required for the next-generation optical disks to store HDTV signals for over 2 hours. To achieve such recording capacity, mastering recorders must have higher resolution performance than present ones. Therefore we have been developing an electron beam recorder (EBR) (Y. Kojima et al, Joint MORIS/ISOM 1997 Tech. Dig., Th-L-06, 1997). Previously we reported the high-resolution performance of the EBR using an electron beam (EB) resist (ZEP-520). At the same time we confirmed the performance of read-only memory (ROM) disks (M. Katsumura et al, ISOM 2000 Tech. Dig., We-C-02, 2000; Y. Wada et al, Jpn. J. Appl. Phys. vol. 40, pp. 1653-1660, 2001). We acquired sufficient process quality for next generation optical disks, but the recording speed in this process is not sufficient for mass production. Accordingly it is necessary to raise the recording speed in EB mastering. Although there are several proposals for high-speed recording, we propose a chemically amplified resist (CAR) method for the improvement of mass production. In this paper, we report the application of the CAR to high-speed EB recording and the reproduction performance of the 25 GB CAR disks.