Lithography Imprint-To produce (a mark or pattern) on a

surface by pressure.
Nanoscale

Uv- Method

 This was first invented by Prof. Stephen Chou

and his students in 1995.

This is a method of fabricating nanometer

scale patterns.
It creates patterns by mechanical deformation

of imprint resist and subsequent processes.

This is the road map for the 32-nm

semiconductor technology

 The materials required for the Imprint technique

is
(i) a mold with predefined surface relief

nanostructures, and (ii) a suitable resist material that can be deformed and hardened to preserve the shape of the impression.

 Thermal expansion co-efficient is an important factor

to be considered. Si, SiO2, SiC, silicon nitride, metals,sapphire, and diamond film.

 Steps in fabrication:-

A resist material is spin-coated onto the mold

surface. Followed by lithography to define the desired mold pattern. A hard masking layer, such as a metal can be deposited over the patterned resist template. Followed by a lift-off process that removes the resist template and the material on top, leaving a patterned mask layer on the Si substrate. An anisotropic RIE process is used to selectively etch away the Si material in the unmasked region, producing the surface relief structures required for NIL

 Thermoplastic Nanoimprint lithography

Uv-curved NanoImprint Lithographhy

Roll imprint process, Laser-assisted direct imprint, Reverse imprint lithography, Substrate conformal imprint lithography, Ultrasonic NIL, etc.

 The UV curved Nanoimprint Lithography is normally

carried out in room temperature and at low pressure.

The mold material used is of transparent type fused with

silica.
Here we do use the soft UV for the lithographic process. The resist material used is the liquid polymer but in

thermal method they use thermal plastic.

 The transparent mold is pressed over the resist

material.
Now the cavities are fully filled by the resist.

Now the resist is curved by the UV-rays so that the

resist will become solid and it is etched till the base.

After demolding, a similar pattern transfer process can

be used to transfer the pattern in resist onto the underneath material

 Thickness and uniformity of residual layer.. Pattern fidelity(Precision) Defect control

Filling process

 Template surface treatment

Defect inspection.
Lifetime.

 Nanoimprint lithography has experimentally been

shown to achieve 25nm feature size .

The promise of repeatability and durability

consequently leads this to low costs and ease of fabrication.

 The surface sticking problem has not been perfected . The molding conditions havent been optimized . The effect of thermal expansion through the process is

not fully understood.

 Nanoimprint lithography has been used to fabricate

devices for electrical, optical, photonic and biological

application.
For electronics devices, NIL has been used to fabricate

MOSFET, O-TFT, single electron memory. For optics and

photonics, intensive study has been conducted in fabrication of subwavelength resonant grating filter,

polarizers, waveplate, anti-reflective structures, integrated

photonics circuit and plasmontic devices by NIL.

 Nanoimprint lithography is a simple pattern transfer

process that is neither limited by diffraction nor scattering effects nor secondary electrons, and does not require any sophisticated radiation chemistry. It is also a potentially simple and inexpensive technique. However, a lingering barrier to nanometer-scale patterning is the current reliance on other lithography techniques to generate the template. As of October 2007, Toshiba is the only company to have validated nanoimprint lithography for 22 nm and beyond.

 S. Chou, P. Krauss, P. Renstrom, 1996, Nanoimprint

lithography, J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B, Volume 14(6), pp. 4129-4133. S. Chou, P. Krauss, P. Renstrom, 1996, Imprint Lithography with 25-Nanometer Resolution, SCIENCE, Volume 272, pp. 85-87. www.wikipedeia.org