Directed Fabrication of Ceramic Nanostructures on Fragile Substrates Using Soft-Electron Beam Lithography (soft-eBL)

Published

May 1, 2008

Author(s)

Suresh Donthu, Nasim Alem, Zixlao Pan, Shu-you Li, Gajendra Shekhawat, Vinayak Dravid, Kurt D. Benkstein, Stephen Semancik

Abstract

We demonstrate the use of a facile nanopatterning scheme known as soft-electron beam lithography (soft-eBL) to fabricate and site-specifically position a variety of functional ceramic nanostructures onto fragile substrates: a 75-nm thick electron-transparent silicon nitride membrane and suspended microhotplates with embedded heaters. The patterned nanostructures on nitride membranes can be readily probed with a variety of characterization tools without any post-fabrication sample preparation, allowing observation of the nanostrutures in near-pristine condition. We demonstrate this by characterizing the structural, chemical and optical properties of several ceramic nanostructures patterned on membranes using electron microscopy and surface scanning probe tools such as atomic force microscopy (AFM) and near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM). We further demonstrate that such nanostructures, upon integration with MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) microhotplate platforms, can function as gas-sensing elements and we evaluate their sensing performance at mol/mol target analyte concentration levels.

Citation

IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology

Volume

7

Issue

3

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

DOI Link

Keywords

chemical sensors, electron-beam lithography, high-resolution lithography, metal oxide, nanotechnology, nanowires

Citation

Donthu, S. , Alem, N. , Pan, Z. , Li, S. , Shekhawat, G. , Dravid, V. , Benkstein, K. and Semancik, S. (2008), Directed Fabrication of Ceramic Nanostructures on Fragile Substrates Using Soft-Electron Beam Lithography (soft-eBL), IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/TNANO.2008.917793 (Accessed March 13, 2025)