Abstract

In this Letter, we present a method to prepare a mixed electron-beam resist composed of a positive resist (ZEP520A) and 𝐶60C60 fullerene. The addition of 𝐶60C60 to the ZEP resist changes the material properties under electron beam exposure significantly. An improvement in the thermal resistance of the mixed material has been demonstrated by fabricating multimode interference couplers and coupling regions of microring resonators. The fabrication of distributed Bragg reflector structures has shown improvement in terms of pattern definition accuracy with respect to the same structures fabricated with normal ZEP resist. Straight InP membrane waveguides with different lengths have been fabricated using this mixed resist. A decrease of the propagation loss from 6.6 to 3.3  dB/cm3.3  dB/cm has been demonstrated.