Modeling the Point-Spread Function in Helium-Ion Lithography

We present here a hybrid approach to modeling helium-ion lithography that combines the power and ease-of-use of the Stopping and Range of Ions in Matter (SRIM) software with the results of recent work simulating secondary electron (SE) yield in helium-ion microscopy. This approach traces along SRIM-produced helium-ion trajectories, generating and simulating trajectories for SEs using a Monte Carlo method. We found, both through simulation and experiment, that the spatial distribution of energy deposition in a resist as a function of radial distance from beam incidence, i.e. the point spread function, is not simply a sum of Gauss functions. SCANNING 33: 121128, 2012. (c) 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.