Air Cushion Press for Excellent Uniformity, High Yield, and Fast Nanoimprint Across a 100 mm Field

Abstract

Imprint pressure uniformity is crucial to the pattern uniformity and yield of nanoimprint lithography (NIL) and, hence, its applications. We studied a novel imprint method, air cushion press (ACP), in which the mold and substrate are pressed against each other by gas pressure rather than solid plates, and compared it with a common method, solid parallel-plate press (SPP). We found that (a) under normal imprinting conditions the measured pressure distribution across a 100-mm-diameter single imprint field in ACP is nearly an order of magnitude more uniform; (b) ACP is immune to any dust and topology variations on the backside of the mold or substrate; (c) when a dust particle is between the mold and substrate, ACP reduces the damage area by orders of magnitude; (d) ACP causes much less mold damage because of significantly less lateral shift between the mold and substrate; and (e) ACP has much smaller thermal mass and therefore significantly faster speed for thermal imprinting.

Large area nanoimprint enables ultra-precise x-ray diffraction gratings

“…We chose an air cushion press approach for nanoimprinting since it provides high uniformity of pressure distribution over a large area [17]. Nanoimprinting was performed using a UV curable resist mr-UVCur21 along with an adhesion promoter APS-1 from Microresist Technology GmbH [18].…”

Nanoimprint Lithography

“…Presently, Nanonex provides three series of NIL tools (NX-1000, NX-2000, and NX-3000) for T-NIL and P-NIL, with and without alignment. All of them use the ACP to achieve excellent pattern uniformity (Tan et al, 2004, Gao et al, 2006. Pelzer et al, studied full wafer replication of nanometer features, and presented results on full wafer imprints up to 200mm with high-resolution patterns for microelectronic applications.…”

Simulation and Mitigation of Pattern and Process Dependencies in Nanoimprint Lithography

“…This objective has been met in several ways. One is to apply the embossing load hydrostatically to the back of the stamp, which might be made from silicon [51] or from a more flexible polymeric material (e.g. [52]).…”