Nanoscale patterned articles, such as nanoscale gratings and wires, have many important applications in optics, electronics, biotechnology, and micro-fluidics. They can be used to filter and direct light, to facilitate fabrication of nanoscale mechanical and electronic devices, and to analyze biological molecules.
A typical nanoscale patterned article comprises a substrate with a microscopically patterned surface. A nanoscale grating, for example, can comprise a substrate, such as silicon or resist coated silicon, having a surface array of protruding parallel lines separated by intervening recessed lines. The lines can have a minimum dimension of under 100 nanometers and the spacing between successive lines can be on the order of 200 nm or less. Other articles use different surface patterns of comparably small feature size.
The roughness of line edges and sidewalls in such nanoscale surface patterns has an important bearing on device performance. Studies have shown that roughness causes scattering loss in optical devices, impedes electron transport through nanoscale wires and degrades performance in bio-analytic and micro-fluidic systems.
A variety of approaches have been proposed for the fabrication of smooth nanoscale surface patterned devices, but most are unsuitable for large-scale production. Previous fabrication methods include electron-beam lithography and interference lithography. Electron beam lithography, however, is a serial processing technique of inherently low throughput. Interference lithography is affected by random factors such as disturbances and instabilities in the exposure system which contribute to roughness.
Other approaches to reducing roughness include anisotropic wet etching and thermal oxidation of pattern sidewalls with etch-back. Anisotropic wet etching, however, can only be used on a limited class of crystalline materials. And thermal oxidation requires high temperature processing incompatible with many desirable materials.
Nanoimprint lithography (NIL) is a promising approach to patterning smooth nanoscale features. In NIL, a nanofeatured molding surface is typically imprinted into a surface, such as a polymer-coated substrate. The imprinted pattern can then be coated, as with metal, or the imprinted material can be selectively removed to expose the substrate surface for further processing. Further details concerning nanoimprint lithography are set forth in applicant's U.S. Pat. No. 5,772,905 issued Jun. 30, 1998 and entitled “Nanoimprint Lithography” and U.S. Pat. No. 6,482,742 issued Nov. 19, 2002 and entitled “Fluid Pressure Imprint Lithography.” The '905 and '742 patents are incorporated herein by reference.
The present invention provides articles comprising nanoscale patterns with reduced edge and sidewall roughness through adaptations in NIL processing.
Briefly stated, the present disclosure provides an article comprising a nanoscale surface pattern, such as a grating, is provided with a nanoscale patterns of reduced edge and/or sidewall roughness. Smooth featured articles, can be fabricated by nanoimprint lithography using a mold having tapered profile molding features. Another approach especially fabricates the mold to provide smooth sidewalls of reduced roughness, and yet a third approach provides the article with a post-imprint smoothing step. These approaches can be utilized individually or in combination to make the novel smooth featured articles.
The foregoing features, and advantages set forth in the present disclosure as well as presently preferred embodiments will become more apparent from the reading of the following description in connection with the accompanying drawings.
In the accompanying drawings which form part of the specification:
Corresponding reference numerals indicate corresponding parts throughout the several figures of the drawings. It is to be understood that the drawings are for illustrating the concepts set forth in the present disclosure and are not to scale. Before any embodiments of the invention are explained in detail, it is to be understood that the invention is not limited in its application to the details of construction and the arrangement of components set forth in the following description or illustrated in the drawings.
The following detailed description illustrates the invention by way of example and not by way of limitation. The description enables one skilled in the art to make and use the present disclosure, and describes several embodiments, adaptations, variations, alternatives, and uses of the present disclosure, including what is presently believed to be the best mode of carrying out the present disclosure.
The description is divided into four parts. Part I describes an exemplary article having a nanoscale pattern with smooth edges and/or sidewalls, and Parts II, III and IV describe approaches for making such articles.
I. Exemplary Article
Referring to the drawings,
A particular embodiment of such an article can be a large area sub-200 nanometer period grating. In a typical grating, the protruding features form an array of parallel lines separated by intervening recessed regions. Such gratings are cornerstone structures for many applications. They can be used in UV optical filters, polarizers, sub-wavelength optical devices and ultrahigh density patterned magnetic media.
II. NIL Using Tapered Molds to Reduce Pattern Edge Roughness
Unlike previous imprint-based patterning techniques, the present approach uses grating molds with tapered and preferably triangle-shaped profiles. The complement of the triangle profile relief pattern on the mold is then transferred into a resist thin film carried on a substrate by pressing the mold into the resist and removing the mold.
In essence, this first approach to making a nanoscale surface patterned article with smooth pattern edges and sidewalls comprises the steps of 1) providing a mold with a molding surface having a plurality of tapered regions; 2) providing a work piece with a moldable surface; 3) pressing the molding surface and the moldable surface together to reduce the thickness of the moldable surface under the protruding features. This step produces reduced thickness regions; and 4) separating the mold and the moldable layer. The work piece can then be further processed in the patterned regions to complete a nanoscale surface patterned article.
In exemplary subsequent steps, metal (or other suitable material) can be coated selectively onto the tips of the resist triangles through oblique angle deposition (e.g. shadow evaporation). After removing the portions of the resist that are not covered by the evaporated material to expose the underlying substrate, the grating pattern in the resist can be replicated in a material that is added onto the substrate or can be replicated directly into the substrate.
This approach offers many advantages over the prior art. First, the mold can be patterned to achieve extremely smooth (on the atomic level) sidewalls. The smoothness can be preserved and replicated in the resist (and the underlying substrate) because of the high-resolution (<10 nm) of nano-imprint lithography. Thus the approach produces patterns with smoothness unattainable by the prior art.
Second, this approach offers an advantageous way for controlling the grating duty cycle simply by changing the angle of incidence for shadow evaporation. Different line-widths can be obtained even when using the same mold. Our experiments show the line-width is linearly dependent on the angle of incidence, and it provides a line-width tunable range from 25% to 75% of the grating period. This is believed unachievable with the prior art.
Thirdly, the approach utilizes the natural crystalline orientations of the material that makes up the mold body. The resulting triangle grating lines will have the same apex angle in spite of the possible variations of line-width in the original pattern. Thus, the approach standardizes the mold topology and, at the same time, improves line-width uniformity across a wafer and from wafer to wafer.
We now describe how to provide a mold with tapered projecting features in
The mask layer 10 is then patterned into mask portions 14 (here a grating) to expose portions 16 of the mold surface (
In one experiment, the mold body 12 was made in a (100) silicon substrate, with the mask material 10 being a layer of thermally grown silicon dioxide. The thickness of the oxide typically ranges from 30 nm to 300 nm. The mask layer 10 was then patterned into portions 14 of a 200 nm period grating using interference lithography and reactive ion etching.
The substrate was briefly dipped into a diluted hydrofluoric acid (HF) to remove oxide that may have remained in the regions 16 between the mask lines 14. A mixture of 500 g potassium hydroxide (KOH), 1600 ml deionized (DI) water, and 400 ml isopropyl alcohol (IPA) was used for the wet chemical etching step indicated in
It should be understood that methods for creating a triangle profiled grating mold are not limited to those described here. For example, instead of patterning a deposited film 10, material can be added onto the substrate to create the grating mask 14 through suitable means such as evaporation and lift-off.
After this removal step, the grating pattern can be replicated in a material that is added on substrate 26 or can be replicated directly into substrate 26 by etching.
In addition to the extreme smoothness of the sidewalls, the present approach provides a convenient way to control grating line-width.
Also, since the duty cycle/angle of incidence dependence is almost linear, the change of duty cycle can be achieved simply by using different angles of incidence, without the need of any modification of the mold or the imprinted resist profile. Thus the duty cycle can be readily varied or controlled in a production line.
In contrast, in conventional interference lithography, the change of grating duty cycle is typically achieved by using different doses for the exposure of photo-resist, the duty cycle/dose dependence generally is not linear, the tuning range is small, the process is hard to control and not easily repeatable because line-widths are also affected by factors such as random disturbances and instability of the exposure system. The present approach also offers the added benefit for improving grating line-width uniformity, as depicted in
Good mold release properties are important in fabricating nanoscale features by nanoimprint lithography. Using a triangle shaped grating profile instead of a square greatly facilitates mold release.
There are two contributing factors to this improvement: First, for two molds with the same grating period 38 and feature depth 42 but with different profiles (triangle and square) as shown in
The measurement clearly indicates that the triangle profile greatly reduced the total force needed to separate the mold from the resist, compared with a mold with square profile. Easier separation implies more flexibility in designing and choosing the imprint resists, which is very important and valuable for the implementation of large-scale production of nano-gratings by nano-imprint lithography.
III. NIL Using Smooth Walled Molds to Reduce Pattern Edge Roughness
Because line edge roughness in the master mold will also be duplicated in the resist, it is desirable to reduce sidewall roughness of the master mold. This approach to making a nanoscale surface patterned article with smooth pattern edges and sidewalls comprises the steps of 1) providing a mold with a molding surface having a plurality of protruding regions with smooth walls; 2) providing a work piece with a moldable surface; 3) pressing the molding surface and the moldable surface together to reduce the thickness of the moldable surface under the protruding features to produce reduced thickness regions; and 4) separating the mold from the moldable surface. The work piece can then be further processed in the patterned regions in accordance with methods well known in the art.
The wet etching technique used in the mold fabrication step illustrated in
Grating patterns are duplicated onto a surface patterned article using those Si surface relief gratings as master molds by NIL, the schematic of which is shown in
In
IV. NIL Using Post-Imprinting Treatment to Reduce Roughness
A third approach uses a moldable surface that becomes viscous when heated. The approach comprises the steps of providing a work piece with a moldable surface of such material, patterning the moldable surface into a nanoscale surface pattern and then, after the patterning, heating the moldable surface material to its viscous state. In a preferred embodiment, the method comprises the steps of 1) providing a mold with a molding surface having a plurality of protruding regions; 2) providing a work piece with a moldable surface having a glass transition temperature; 3) pressing together the molding surface and the moldable surface to reduce the thickness of the moldable surface under the protruding features to produce reduced thickness regions; 4) separating the mold from the moldable surface; and 5) heating the moldable surface above the glass transition temperature.
This approach can be used to even further smooth moldable surfaces imprinted by the tapered mold process of
It should be pointed out that although we used a specific imprint resist NP-60 in this experiment, this technique is not limited to this single resist. It can be applied to other thermoplastic polymers such as PMMA with similar thermal characteristics as well.
Using these NIL-based line edge roughness reduction techniques, we have successfully fabricated nano-scale gratings over large area (4-inch wafer) on various substrates. The smallest grating pitch achievable is around 190 nm, which is determined by the wavelength of the laser (351.1 nm) used in interference lithography.
These nano-scale gratings with smooth sidewalls have many important applications, including sub wavelength optics, micro/nano-fluidic devices and bio-analysis for the manipulation of single biological molecules.
In sub wavelength optical applications, because transmission loss increases as the second exponential of roughness' as light propagates inside the gratings, smoothing technologies can be used for the fabrication of highly-efficient sub wavelength devices.
Recently we have fabricated and demonstrated a fluidic device consisting of sealed nano-channels so that double-stranded DNA molecules can be stretched and moved along these channels. Fabrication of super smooth gratings is a critical step in this application because of the small dimensions (<100 nm) of the channels, resistance encountered by the molecules as they move in the channels increases drastically as the sidewall roughness increases.
In conclusion, we have developed sidewall smoothing technologies based on nanoimprint lithography. Using these technologies, we have fabricated nano-gratings with extremely smooth sidewalls over large area. Compared with other sidewall smoothing technologies, ours are low-cost, effective and can be applied to a variety of materials and substrates. These smooth gratings have a variety of applications in optics, micro/nano-fluidic devices and biotechnology.
It should be understood that the invention is not limited to the specific techniques and materials described herein, and may be implemented in any appropriate forms. For example other types of materials can be used for the mold body. Besides Si02, other materials (e.g. Si3N4, metal, and polymer) and processes (e.g. lift-off and electron-beam lithography) can be used to pattern the initial wet-etch mask. Other etching processes and conditions can be used to etch the desired features into the mold. In some embodiments, a dry plasma etching using appropriate gases can be utilized in mold preparation to achieve a similar etching selectivity between different crystal planes, so that a comparable effect as wet chemical etching can be obtained.
It should also be pointed out that although the fabrication of one-dimensional grating structure is used here for the purpose of demonstration. The same principle can be applied to the fabrication of two-dimensional structures as well.
To fabricate a two-dimensional structure, the mask 14 depicted in
Pattern transfer using the two-dimensional mold can be carried out in the same spirit as the steps described in
It can now be seen that one aspect of the invention is a nanoscale patterned article having on at least one surface a pattern comprising a plurality of protruding features and recessed features, at least one protruding feature having smooth edges, smooth sidewalls and a minimum lateral dimension between the sidewalls, the edges and sidewalls having a maximum surface roughness less than 5 nanometers and the minimum lateral dimension less than 100 nanometers. Typically a plurality of the protruding features protrude from the surface by a distance in the range 5 to 250 nanometers. In a typical embodiment, a plurality of protruding features comprise an array of parallel lines separated by recessed features to form a grating.
Another aspect of the invention is a method of making an article comprising a nanoscale surface pattern having reduced edge and/or sidewall roughness. The method comprises the steps of: 1) providing a mold with a molding surface having one or more nanoscale protruding regions tapering toward the end distal the surface, the protruding regions arranged complementary to the pattern; 2) providing a work piece with a moldable surface; 3) pressing together the molding surface and the moldable surface to reduce thickness of the moldable surface under the protruding features; and 4) separating the mold from the moldable surface.
A third aspect of the invention involves the use of very smooth mold sidewalls. Specifically, a method of making an article comprising a nanoscale surface pattern having reduced edge and/or sidewall roughness comprising the steps of: 1) providing a mold with a molding surface having one or more nanoscale protruding regions having smooth sidewalls with a surface roughness of less than about 5 nanometers, the protruding regions arranged complementary to the pattern; 2) providing a work piece with a moldable surface and the moldable surface; 3) pressing together the molding surface and the moldable surface to reduce the thickness of the moldable surface under the protruding features; and 4) separating the mold from the moldable surface.
Yet another aspect of the invention involves the use of a moldable surface that becomes viscous upon heating. In a preferred embodiment, it is a method of making an article comprising a nanoscale surface pattern having reduced edge and/or sidewall roughness comprising the steps of: 1) providing a mold with a molding surface having one or more protruding regions arranged complementary to the pattern; 2) providing a work piece with a moldable surface of material having a glass transition temperature; 3) pressing together the molding surface and the moldable surface to reduce the thickness of the moldable surface under the protruding features, thereby imprinting the pattern on the moldable surface; 4) separating the mold from the moldable surface; and 5) heating the moldable surface above the glass transition temperature to smooth the edges and sidewalls of the imprinted pattern.
As various changes could be made in the above constructions without departing from the scope of the disclosure, it is intended that all matter contained in the above description or shown in the accompanying drawings shall be interpreted as illustrative and not in a limiting sense.
The present application claims priority from, and is a division of, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/732,038 filed on Dec. 10, 2003, which in turn, is a continuation-in-part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/046,594 filed on Oct. 29, 2001, which claims priority to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/107,006 filed on Jun. 30, 1998 (now U.S. Pat. No. 6,309,580 issued Oct. 30, 2001) and which, in turn, claims priority to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/558,809 filed on Nov. 15, 1995 (now U.S. Pat. No. 5,772,905 issued Jun. 30, 1998). The foregoing '038, '594, '006, and '809 applications are each incorporated herein by reference. The '038 Application further claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60/432,213 filed on Dec. 10, 2002 and also claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60/432,216 filed on Dec. 10, 2002. The foregoing '213 and '216 provisional applications are each incorporated herein by reference.
The invention was sponsored in part by the Government under grant 170-6394 and the Government has certain rights to the invention.
Number | Date | Country | |
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60432213 | Dec 2002 | US | |
60432216 | Dec 2002 | US |
Number | Date | Country | |
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Parent | 10732038 | Dec 2003 | US |
Child | 12034478 | US | |
Parent | 09107006 | Jun 1998 | US |
Child | 10046594 | US |
Number | Date | Country | |
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Parent | 10046594 | Oct 2001 | US |
Child | 10732038 | US | |
Parent | 08558809 | Nov 1995 | US |
Child | 09107006 | US |