US researchers have been taking another look at imprint lithography, stamping circuits into polymer resist, as a possible replacement for photolithography.
“This work provides a rational link between what engineers want to make using nanoimprint lithography and the path for creating them,” said William King of Georgia Tech’s school of mechanical engineering.
“We have developed manufacturing design rules that will give future users of this technology a predictive tool kit so they’ll know what to expect over a broad range of parameters.”
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Georgia Tech graduate student Andrew Cannon shows
a plastic sheet containing micro-mechanical features
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Together with Sandia Labs, Georgia Tech has used modelling and practical experiments.
They studied such variables as shear deformation of the polymer, elastic stress release, capillary flow and viscous flow during the filling of imprinting tool cavities that had varying sizes and shapes.
“This helped us to resolve the phenomenological events that occur during the manufacturing process and to link them to the observed experimental outcomes,” King explained.
“Because we have blanketed the entire design space, we have a firm understanding on the linkage between process parameters and outcomes.”
Nanoimprint was singled out last year by analyst Lux Research as a possible way to keep Moore's Law on track.
In 2004, German chip equipment firm EV Group said it would install a fully automated nanoimprint lithography system.
Georgia Tech