Diazoquinone photoresists are very reliable materials for photolithography. They have been used extensively by the electronic industry because of their reliability, stability, and ease of operation; and a large body of information has been gathered regarding their application and use. Therefore, it would be natural to extend their use to the field of x-ray lithography. Unfortunately, the response of these resists to x-ray radiation is poor, and requires 1.2 J/cm(2). Such a dose is too high for practical applications. Amplified resists have been used successfully in x-ray lithography, but this came with the usual environmental sensitivity of the amplified resists. Here we report the modification of diazoquinone resists for x-ray lithography, This was accomplished by substituting hydrogen atoms in the photoactive compound (PAC) by iodine. The attachment was carried out in two ways. In the first approach, we used iodine containing moieties to bridge several conventional diazonaphthoquinone sulfonates. Some of these bridging groups contained one iodine atom, while others contained more. We were able to determine the relationship between the number of iodine atoms in the PAC to the x-ray lithography sensitivity. The second approach was to synthesize a new diazonaphthoquinone where one of the hydrogen atoms on the naphthalene ring was substituted with an iodine atom. This modification enabled us to understand the importance of the proximity effect of the iodine to the diazoquinone group. It was found that placing one iodine atom next to the diazoquinone group produces an improvement that is equivalent to placing three iodine atoms on the bridge. The described modifications lead to considerable improvement in the sensitivity of the resist. This article describes the synthetic methods employed and the corresponding lithographic results.