Towards environmentally friendly, dry deposited, water developable molecular glass photoresists

Photoresists based on molecular glasses are gaining more and more importance as resist material to replace polymer based photoresist. In addition environmental issues have to be considered in the long-term. Therefore the paper describes novel negative photoresists containing a ternary mixture of a glassy low molecular functional polyphenol where the film preparation is possible by solvent-free physical vapor deposition. After UV light exposure and a thermal annealing process to enable acid catalyzed crosslinking between the molecular glass and the crosslinker, the photoresist was developed using only water to give well-defined patterns. In order to experimentally study efficiently the multiple parameters such as composition, exposure dose, and development times combinatorial PVD techniques were utilized.