High-Throughput, Continuous Nanopatterning Technologies for Display and Energy Applications.

[摘要] The motivation of this work is to enable continuous patterning of nanostructures on flexible substrates to push nanoscale lithography to an entirely new level with drastically increased throughput. The Roll-to-Roll Nanoimprint Lithography (R2RNIL) technology presented in this work retains the high-resolution feature capabilities of traditional NIL, but with an increase in throughput by at least one or two orders of magnitude. We demonstrated large-area (4” wide) continuous imprinting of nanogratings by using a newly developed apparatus capable of roll-to-roll imprinting on flexible substrates (R2RNIL) and roll-to-plate imprinting on rigid substrates (R2PNIL). In addition, analytical models were developed to predict the residual layer thickness in dynamic R2RNIL. As a potential application, high-performance metal wire-grid polarizers have also been fabricated utilizing R2RNIL.Another research focus involved Direct Metal Imprinting (DMI) to create discrete nano-scale metal gratings. DMI uses a polymer cushion layer between a thin metal layer and a hard substrate, which enables room-temperature nanoimprinting of the metal by overcoming troublesome hard-to-hard surface contact issues while preserving the Si mold. We also introduced a novel nanofabrication technique, Dynamic Nano-Inscribing (DNI) for creating truly continuous nanograting patterns by using the sharp edge of a tilted Si mold on a variety of metals or polymer materials, creating linewidths down to 50 nm at extremely high speeds (~100 mm/sec) under ambient conditions. Additionally, a new nanograting fabrication method, Localized Dynamic Wrinkling (LDW) has been developed. LDW enables the continuous formation of micro/nano-scale gratings by simply sliding a flat edge of a cleaved Si wafer over the metal film. LDW shares the same basic principle as the buckling (wrinkling) phenomenon but the moving edge of the tilted Si wafer exerts stress on a metal coated polymer and sequentially generates localized winkles in the metal film in a dynamic fashion. The period in LDW can be controlled by several processing parameters and shows good agreement with a theoretical model.Finally, we developed a Dynamic Nano-Cutting (DNC) process using high-frequency indentations on a moving substrate to sequentially create nanograting patterns. DNC provides perfectly straight lines with real-time period modulation, which is difficult to achieve by other nanomanufacturing techniques.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Electrical Engineering

[关键词] High-throughput Continuous Nanopatterning for Display and Energy Applications;Electrical Engineering;Mechanical Engineering;Engineering;Mechanical Engineering