Trimming lithography part I: The alternative technology for sub-resolution and sub-wavelength patterning

Lithography is the key technology to scale down a size of integrated circuits that will increase the performance of an electronics device (smaller, faster, cheaper, and low power consumption). There are many lithographic techniques which can produce a nanometer feature size. However, the cost for equipment and mask for those techniques is extremely high. Based on this limitation, this paper introduces an alternative patterning technique called Trimming lithography to produce sub-resolution and sub-wavelength features. The results show that as small as 0.18 μm photoresist linewidth can be produced using the 0.8 μm pattern on a conventional binary mask. The trimming lithography can thus be one of the candidates for future lithography.