Continuous rapid shrinking of feature size made the authorities to seek alternative patterning methods as the conventional photolithography comes with its intrinsic resolution limit. In this regard, some promising techniques have been proposed as next-generation lithography (NGL) that has the potentials to achieve both high-volume production and very high resolution. This article reviews the promising NGL techniques and introduces the challenges and a perspective on future directions of the NGL techniques. Extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) is considered as the main candidate for sub-10-nm manufacturing, and it could potentially meet the current requirements of the industry. Remarkable progress in EUVL has been made and the tools will be available for commercial operation soon. Maskless lithography techniques are used for patterning in R&D, mask/mold fabrication and low-volume chip design. Directed self-assembly has already been realized in laboratory and further effort will be needed to make it as NGL solution. Nanoimprint lithography has emerged attractively due to its simple process steps, high throughput, high resolution and low cost and become one of the commercial platforms for nanofabrication. However, a number of challenging issues are waiting ahead, and further technological progresses are required to make the techniques significant and reliable to meet the current demand. Finally, a comparative study is presented among these techniques.
The nanoelectrode lithography has been strengthened in recent years as one of the most promising methods due to its high reproducibility, low cost and ability to manufacture nanosized structures. In this work, the mechanism and the parametric influence in nanoelectrode lithography have been studied qualitatively in atomic scale using ReaxFF MD simulation.This approach was originally developed by van Duin and co-workers to investigate hydrocarbon chemistry. We have investigated the water adsorption and dissociation processes on Si (100) surface as well as the characteristics (structure, chemical composition, morphology, charge distribution, etc.) of the oxide growth. The simulation results show two forms of adsorption of water molecules: molecular adsorption and dissociative adsorption.After breaking the adsorbed hydroxyls, the oxygen atoms insert into the substrate to form the Si−O−Si bonds so as to make the surface oxidized. The influence of the electric field intensity (1.5 -7 V/nm) and the relative humidity (20 -90%) on the oxidation process have also been discussed. Nevertheless, the results obtained from the simulations have been compared qualitatively with the experimental results and they show in good agreements.Variable charge molecular dynamics allowed us to characterize the nanoelectrode lithography process from an atomistic point of view.
Non-uniformity and low throughput issues severely limit the application of nanoelectrode lithography for large area nanopatterning. This paper proposes, for the first time, a new rolling nanoelectrode lithography approach to overcome these challenges. A test-bed was developed to realize uniform pressure distribution over the whole contact area between the roller and the silicon specimen, so that the local oxidation process occurred uniformly over a large area of the specimen. In this work, a brass roller wrapped with a fabricated polycarbonate strip was used as a stamp to generate nanopatterns on a silicon surface. The experimental results show that a uniform pattern transfer for a large area can be achieved with this new rolling nanoelectrode lithography approach. The rolling speed and the applied bias voltage were identified as the primary control parameters for oxide growth. Furthermore, the pattern direction showed no significant influence on the oxide process. We therefore demonstrated that nanoelectrode lithography can be scaled up for large-area nanofabrication by incorporating a roller stamp.
In order to reveal the underlying mechanism of surface microstructure-determined wetting states, this paper adopted Volume of Fluid (VOF) method to investigate the dynamic behaviours of water droplets impacting on surfaces with different structures at low and high Weber numbers. The simulation results showed that the high and stable pressure of air pockets is critical for the formation of the superhydrophobicity. A superhydrophobic substrate will result in shorter recoiling time and longer rebound time for water droplet than the hydrophobic substrate. Furthermore, superhydrophobic surface resulted in higher kinetic energy for water droplet than hydrophobic surfaces, which is the underlying mechanism of microstructureenabled self-cleaning function. High-speed camera tests of laser processed surface microstructures were conducted to validate the observation in dynamic impacting simulation. The results in both high-speed camera testing and VOF simulation proved that water droplet will have a lower adhesion force when impacting superhydrophobic surface than hydrophobic surface.
The crystallographic orientation of the substrate is an essential parameter in the kinetic mechanism for the oxidation process. Hence, the choice of substrate surface orientation is crucial in nanofabrication industries. In the present work, we have studied qualitatively the influence of substrate orientation in nanoelectrode lithography using ReaxFF reactive molecular dynamics simulation. We have investigated the oxidation processes on (100), (110) and (111) orientation surfaces of silicon at different electric field intensities. The simulation results show the thickness of the oxide film and the initial oxygen diffusion rate follow an order of (100) > (110) > (111) at lower electric field intensities. It also confirms that surfaces with higher surface energy are more reactive at lower electric field intensity. Crossovers occurred at a higher electric field intensity (7 V nm−1) under which the thickness of the oxide film yields an order of T(110) > T(100) > T(111). These types of anomalous characteristics have previously been observed for thermal oxidation of silicon surfaces. Experimental results show different orders for the (100) and (111) substrate, while (110) remains the largest for the oxide thickness. A good correlation has been found between the oxide growth and the orientation-dependent parameters where the oxide growth is proportional to the areal density of the surfaces. The oxide growth also follows the relative order of the activation energies, which could be another controlling factor for the oxide growth. Less activation energy of the surface allows more oxide growth and vice versa. However, the differences between simulation and experimental results probably relate to the empirical potential as well as different time and spatial scales of the process.
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