Room temperature nanoimprint technology

Abstract

Nano-imprint-lithography (NIL) (Chou et al, 1997), in which resist patterns are fabricated by deforming the resist physical shape through embossing with a mold, is a very useful technique to make nanostructure devices and various nanostructure devices such as a quantized magnetic disk (Wu et al, 1998) have been demonstrated by this method. It has excellent features with sub-10 nm feature size over a large area with high throughput and low cost. However, as a conventional NIL process has to heat a resist above the glass transition temperature to deform the resist physical shape with a mold pattern, the heating process causes serious problems for pattern accuracy. To overcome this problem, room-temperature replication into SOG (spin-on-glass) and HSQ (hydrogen silsesquioxane) (Namatsu et al, 1998) has been proposed and experiments have been conducted. In this paper, we describe a room-temperature replication into SOG/HSQ and a pattern transfer to a metal pattern and a substrate by using lift-off and RIE processes.