Roller-based laser assisted direct imprinting for nanofabrication

Abstract

This paper reports an improved nanofabrication method based on laser-assisted direct imprinting (LADI) technology. The key element in this improvement is to introduce a quartz roller into the LADI process. The quartz roller optically focuses an incident UV laser light into a line onto a silicon substrate, and mechanically compresses a quartz mold against the silicon substrate. Under the action of both laser melting and mechanical pressure, the mold can imprint into the silicon and transfer the mold’s surface features directly to the silicon substrate. This roller-type LADI approach has several significant advantages as compared to the original planar type LADI. It transforms the LADI process into a large-area, continuous, and high throughput nano-fabrication method. Experimental tests in this work demonstrate the direct fabrication of nano-structures of 500 nm line width with an imprinting speed of 5 x 60 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> per minute in a continuous configuration.