Sub-micron niobium electrodes for dielectrophoresis applications

Microelectrodes consisting of a vertical structure made by the superposition of niobium, titanium and gold layers have been fabricated using electron beam lithography and thin film technique. The niobium layer improves the mechanical strength and ensures a good resistance of the structure to the galvanic corrosion which is a very important characteristic when dealing with biological particles. The proximity corrections have been applied in order to obtain the PMMA resist with a suitable profile for the lift-off of the View the MathML source layers. This corrections allowed us to setup the process to obtain electrode gaps down to 0.2?m