Abstract: We present an all-e-beam lithography (EBL) process for the patterning of photonic crystal waveguides.The whole device structures are exposed in two steps.Holes constituting the photonic crystal lattice and defects are first exposed with a small exposure step size (less than 10nm).With the introduction of the additional proximity effect to compensate the original proximity effect,the shape,size,and position of the holes can be well controlled.The second step is the exposure of the access waveguides at a larger step size (about 30nm) to improve the scan speed of the EBL.The influence of write-field stitching error can be alleviated by replacing the original waveguides with tapered waveguides at the joint of adjacent write-fields.It is found experimentally that a higher exposure efficiency is achieved with a larger step size;however,a larger step size requires a higher dose.

Key words: photonic crystal, e-beam lithography, stitching problem, proximity effect correction