Creating direct-write gray-scale photomasks with bimetallic thin film thermal resists
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
New types of analog gray-scale laser direct-write masks have been created using bimetallic thermal resists and a direct- write laser process. Bimetallic resists consist of two layers of thin films, eg. Bi over In or Sn over In, which react to form a low temperature alloy when a laser raises the films above the eutectic temperature. Depending on the exposure energy, resulting alloyed layers appear to become oxides, causing a change of absorption at 365nm from >3OD to <0.3OD. The thermal resists show near wavelength invariance from IR to UV. The Sn/In films, each layer ~40 nm thick, were DC-sputtered onto glass slides or quartz substrates. To make gray-scale photomasks the samples were placed on a computer-controlled high accuracy X-Y table. A bitmap gray-scale pattern was raster-scanned with a CW Argon laser (514 nm) beam. An optical shutter controlled the actual laser power applied onto the thermal resist film according to the gray-scale value. When exposed to a laser beam greater than 0.6 W, the Sn/In film became nearly transparent (0.22OD) at I-line (365nm) wavelength. Sn/In and Bi/In photomasks have been used together with a standard mask aligner to successfully pattern Shipley SPR2FX-1.3 photoresist. CF<sub>4</sub>/O<sub>2</sub> plasma etching has been used to transfer the three-dimensional pattern to SiO<sub>2</sub> and Si substrates. Also a 160 beam laser diode thermal imaging tool was used to create BiIn direct-write binary masks.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it