UV irradiation effect on sol-gel indium tin oxide nanopatterns replicated by room-temperature nanoimprint

Abstract

The authors report the first room-temperature nanoimprint lithography (RT-NIL) process using sol-gel indium tin oxide (ITO) as a replicated material. The spin-coated ITO film has to be annealed over 600°C to obtain a low resistivity. The spin-coated ITO film can be delineated by RT-NIL, but the patterns disappear after annealing at 200°C. To overcome the above problem, they examined UV irradiation effects on a spin-coated ITO film. As a result, they found that the ITO patterns imprinted by RT-NIL stayed the same after being annealed at 600°C for 1h due to 254nm UV irradiation before annealing.