Programmable Soft Lithography – Solvent Assisted Nanoembossing for Nanopatterning Six Inch Wafers for Less than $100

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Nanoletters –
Programmable Soft Lithography: Solvent-Assisted Nanoscale Embossing

This paper reports an all-moldable nanofabrication platform that can generate, from a single master, large-area nanoscale patterns with programmable densities, fill factors, and lattice symmetries. Solvent-assisted nanoscale embossing (SANE) could increase the spacing of patterns up to 100% as well as decrease them down to 50% in a single step by stretching or heating a polymer substrate. Also, SANE could reduce critical feature sizes as small as 45% compared to the master by controlled swelling of patterned molds with different solvents. These capabilities were applied to generate plasmonic nanoparticle arrays with continuously variable separations and hence different optical properties on the same substrate.

The magical world of Shrinky Dinks — an arts and crafts material used by children since the 1970s — has taken up residence in a Northwestern University laboratory. A team of nanoscientists is using the flexible plastic sheets as the backbone of a new inexpensive way to create, test and mass-produce large-area patterns on the nanoscale.

The method offers unprecedented opportunities to manipulate the electronic, photonic and magnetic properties of nanomaterials. It also easily controls a pattern’s size and symmetry and can be used to produce millions of copies of the pattern over a large area. Potential applications include devices that take advantage of nanoscale patterns, such as solar cells, high-density displays, computers and chemical and biological sensors.

“No other existing nanopatterning method can both prototype arbitrary patterns with small separations and reproduce them over six-inch wafers for less than $100,” Odom said.

SANE offers a way to meet three grand challenges in nanofabrication from the same — and a single — master pattern: (1) creating programmable array densities, (2) reducing critical feature sizes, and (3) designing different and reconfigurable lattice symmetries over large areas and in a massively parallel manner.

3 pages of supplemental material

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