Large-Area and High-Precision Milling of Focused Ion Beam Based on the Integration of Nanoscale Machine Vision and Compensation Control

Abstract Focused ion beam (FIB) is a high-precision technology for micro/nanofabrication that can be used to fabricate micro/nanoscale structures and electronic devices, such as waveguide gratings, resonators, and photonic crystals. In this study, a novel FIB processing system was developed using machine vision coupled with a piezoelectric motor, which compensates the process periodically and automatically. The FIB system is controlled by a computer program that enables automatic processing, automatic recognition, and provides feedback to control the movement of the stage. The results show that ring arrays with a diameter of 2 μm can be detected automatically under the field of view (FOV) of 114 × 114 μm2 with relative errors of less than 6%. The FOV can be larger than 400 × 400 μm2 after the splicing function of automatic compensation control is applied to the same ring arrays. Structurally, the average splicing errors in the X- and Y-directions decreased one order of magnitude, which are from 1.49 to 0.15 μm and 1.47 to 0.37 μm, respectively. This paves the way for the mass production of nanoholes in a large area with high precision and high speed for semiconductor manufacturing and research.