Design of a high positioning contact probe for plasmonic lithography

We suggest a geometrically modified probe to achieve high positioning accuracy for plasmonic lithography which can record nanometer scale features and has high throughput. Instead of a cantilever probe, we propose a circular probe which has arc-shaped arms that hold the tip at the center. The modified probe is based on the fixed-fixed beam in material mechanics. To calculate the tip displacement, we used a finite element method (FEM) for a circular probe and compared the results with cantilever probe. We considered a silicon-based micro-fabrication process to design the probe. The probe has a square outline boundary with a length of 50μm, four arms, and a pyramidal tip with a height of 5μm. The ratio of the lateral tip displacement to the vertical deflection was evaluated to indicate the positioning accuracy. The probe has higher accuracy by a factor of 10³ and 10 in approach mode and scan mode, respectively, compared to a cantilever probe. We expect that a circular probe is appropriate for the applications that require high positioning accuracy, such as nanolithography with a contact probe and multiple-probe arrays.