Abstract
We present a novel x-ray lithography based micromanufacturing methodology that offers scalable manufacturing of high precision optical components. It is accomplished through simultaneous usage of multiple stencil masks made moveable with respect to one another through custom made micromotion stages. The range of spectral flux reaching the sample surface at the LiMiNT micro/nanomanufacturing facility of Singapore Synchrotron Light Source (SSLS) is about 2 keV to 10 keV, offering substantial photon energy to carry out deep x-ray lithography. In this energy range, x-rays penetrate through resist materials with only little scattering. The highly collimated rectangular beam architecture of the x-ray source enables a full 4″ wafer scale fabrication. Precise control of dose deposited offers determined chain scission in the polymer to required depth enabling 1800 discrete gray levels in a chip of area 20 mm2 and with more than 2000 within our reach. Due to its parallel processing capability, our methodology serves as a promising candidate to fabricate micro/nano components of optical quality on a large scale to cater for industrial requirements. Usage of these fine components in analytical devices such as spectrometers and multispectral imagers transforms their architecture and shrinks their size to pocket dimension. It also reduces their complexity and increases affordability while also expanding their application areas. Consequently, equipment based on these devices is made available and affordable for consumers and businesses expanding the horizon of analytical applications. Mass manufacturing is especially vital when these devices are to be sold in large quantities especially as components for original equipment manufacturers (OEM), which has also been demonstrated through our work. Furthermore, we also substantially improve the quality of the micro-components fabricated, 3D architecture generated, throughput, capability and availability for industrial application. Manufacturing 1800 Gray levels or more through other competing techniques is either limited due to multiple process steps involved or due to unacceptably long time required owing to their pencil beam architecture. Our manufacturing technique presented here overcomes both these shortcomings in terms of the maximum number of gray levels that can be generated, and the time required to generate the same.
Highlights
There has been an active market demand for three-dimensional micro and nano components that require a large number N of gray levels for various applications in the last two decades pushing the requirement for such work[1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The most important feature required to generate micro-components with surfaces of optical quality using x-ray lithography is the requirement of stencil masks
On the contrary, when the same structure is fabricated using stencil masks that are free of membranes, the etched surfaces are of optical quality, with a surface roughness in the order of 10–50 nm
Summary
There has been an active market demand for three-dimensional micro and nano components that require a large number N of gray levels for various applications in the last two decades pushing the requirement for such work[1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. We used stencil masks[27,28,29], custom designed and manufactured to fabricate the novel architecture of micro-components required for various analytical devices. Here we refer to a wafer of diameter 4′′ and higher, applicable for large scale manufacturing to cater for industrial requirements. This study offers a solution to the influence of diffraction effect copied from the primary pattern generated in the x-ray masks to the functional structures. Another challenge in our process was the removal of polymer from the stencil masks which is dependent on the feature s ize[31,32] which was addressed through our work
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