Raith Status 01102005:1530 hours... Qualification in progress -- yellow through noon tomorrow.

[James Conway]

Greetings:

I checked out the system and my exposure parameters thoroughly while 
attempting to determine what went wrong with yesterday's ebeam write. 
This qualification run the doses were very much higher than specified.  
The only thing I observed was that there has been a significant jump 
upwards in Beam Current (Beam I) measuring through the 30 um aperture.  
This could in fact be why everything I wrote was so overexposed. But 
this would not account for the fact that contamination dots were so 
difficult to generate or image.  Note I did bake my sample at 90 degrees 
Celsius for 90 seconds while yesterday I had forgotten to bake the 
sample before loading into the system.

Today's session went much better.  Default values saved yesterday of Gun 
and Aperture alignment settings to the mic.ini files rendered very nice 
shots down to 12 - 15 nm with 22 nm being the normal using the short 
shot spot mode upon loading my sample with little adjustment required.  
(i.e., the short shot is the left hand mouse button on the dot mode hot 
button on the toolbar.)

I am repeating the QUALIFICATION WRITE having moved the entire write up 
12 mm in V axis on my sample.
(01072005_1PCM.pls now is 01072005_2PCM.pls)
Watching the exposure, all appears to be normal would be observed.  I 
will be inspecting this pattern in the late morning tomorrow when I go 
into the cleanroom.

System will stay in 'yellow light mode' until I am satisfied everything 
on the system is operating optimally.  Please stay tuned and if you 
utilize the system this evening be sure to make adequate notes of your 
exposure to aid my troubleshooting effort.


All the best,

James Conway