AVS 56th International Symposium & Exhibition
    Thin Film Thursday Sessions
       Session TF-ThA

Paper TF-ThA10
Large-Scale Simulations of Nanoimprint Lithography

Thursday, November 12, 2009, 5:00 pm, Room B4

Session: Next Generation Processing
Presenter: M. Chandross, Sandia National Laboratories
Authors: M. Chandross, Sandia National Laboratories
G.S. Grest, Sandia National Laboratories
Correspondent: Click to Email
The production of surfaces with controllable/tunable nanostructures over large areas and at throughputs practical for commercial applications can be very difficult. Two processes of recent interest have been step-flash imprint lithography (SFIL) and nanoimprint lithography (NIL) in which nanoscale masks are imprinted into polymeric materials to create features with nm-scale resolution. Empirical approaches are currently the norm for industrial scale-up but are often prohibitively time-consuming and expensive. Modeling and simulation can decrease manufacturing process design cycle time enormously, as has been proven in many industry segments.

Here we present our activities specifically with regard to nanopatterning by detailed large-scale simulations of nanolithographical processes in which rigid molds are imprinted into liquid oligomers that are subsequently hardened. We use a generic polymer model that can be applied to both SFIL, in which the oligomers are cross-linked by exposure to UV irradiation, and NIL, in which the liquid is hardened by lowering the temperature below the glass transition. Multiple stamps are inserted into melts of liquid oligomers at a temperature above the glass transition. The melts are either quenched or croslinked and the systems are equilibrated. Stamps are then either removed at constant velocity to study the effects of stress and adhesion on resulting features, or simply deleted to study the effects in the limit of zero stress. We vary the size and pitch of the stamps in order to study the resolution limits of both methods.