Dry development of silylated resist: influence of substrate temperature

During the last few years, silylation processes have been extensively studied. In particular, the mechanisms of silicon incorporation in the resist have been discussed. However, the importance of the dry etching step, which allows the image transfer in the resist, has often been neglected. In this paper it is shown that under standard dry etching conditions, the slight increase in the substrate temperature leads to the liquefaction of the silylated area which then flows down onto the sidewalls of the patterns.