Posted at the BLOG of SUNY-Albany (II)

Since the first moment that I saw the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, I thought that I was in another dimension. While the staff was showing us around the beautiful complex, I became even more excited of my acceptance as a summer intern to CNSE. In my life, I have never seen so much advanced technology in one place. CNSE is the ideal place to do any type of research on nanotechnology.
When I learned about my project, I had no idea what it was, then I met the people I would be working with and they explained the general idea of my project. I still needed to learn more details about my project, so I had to read about thirty papers to understand. That was my first task: just reading. When I finished reading, I did not understand much; however, every day I learn something new about my project.
The name of my project is "Modeling resist performance". The problem here is that when we want to measure the dimensions of the photoresist patterns with the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), there is a reaction between the resist and the electrons. Consequentially, the resist suffers a change called "shrinkage phenomenon". In other words, the photoresist shrinks and the dimensions change too. If we scan more with the SEM, the photoresist shrinks more. So, how do we get the true measurements? By using an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) we can get the true measurements without damaging the resist. But this tool is not used to do that, because it is slower than a SEM. The best way to understand the phenomenon is just modeling it with math. So, I am working with MatLab program and comparing with the real data from AFM.

Daniel Bellido Aguilar, CNSE Intern

June 23, 2009