A Te-free binary phase change material SbBi is proposed as a new inorganic photoresist for heat-mode lithography. It shows good film-forming ability (surface roughness <1 nm), low threshold power for crystallization (2 mW), and high etching selectivity (15:1). Line-type, dot-type, and complex pattern structures with the smallest feature size of 275 nm are fabricated on SbBi thin films using a 405 nm diode laser direct writing system. In addition, the excellent grating structures with a period of 0.8 μm demonstrate that thermal interference does not affect the adjacent microstructures obviously. These results indicate that SbBi is a promising laser heat-mode resist material for micro/nanostructure fabrication.

Metal hydrazone complex thin films are used as laser patterning materials, and the patterns with a minimum resolution of about 78 nm are successfully obtained by the laser writing setup (λ=405 nm, NA=0.9). The minimum resolution is only about 1/8 of the writing spot size. In the formation of patterns, there is only a single step for forming patterns by the laser heating-induced clear thermal gasification threshold effect without any other development processes such as wet etching. This work provides an effective method for directly achieving nanoscale-resolved pattern structures with diode-based maskless laser writing lithography at visible light wavelengths.