Lithography-induced wettability changes of silicon

Abstract

In recent years, the fabrication of hydrophobic surface has become a research hotspot. In this paper, three different patterns were fabricated successfully on the silicon wafers by lithography technology and the effects of dimension and interval parameters on surface wettability were the highlights in this study. Due to the different structural features, the overall average of linear pattern's contact angles were less than the overall average of grid pattern's contact angles and dot pattern's contact angles. What's more, the dimension parameters played a more important role than the interval parameters on the surface wettability. The smaller dimension of microstructure obviously preferred to have higher contact angle with better surface hydrophobic performance, especially when the size is less than 100μm. When the dimension of microstructure was 60μm, the contact angle were all larger than 90°, and some of them even reached the super-hydrophobic surface (larger than 150°).