Design of a Hot Plate with Rapid Cooling Capability for Thermal Nanoimprint Lithography

A hot plate device has been designed as a thermal treatment tool for the press-type hot embossing nanoimprinting machine which copies the nanopatterns on stamp to polymer substrate. Design goal is to achieve the performance of rapid heating and cooling, and high temperature uniformity as well as the strength to endure high stamping pressure. Analysis of design requirements leads to a new hot plate configuration having cooling holes and cartridge heaters which are straight and arranged in parallel for scalability toward large area. Zone control method is adopted to ensure high temperature uniformity. Numerical computation has been conducted for assessing the feasibility of design concept. Parallel experiments have also been performed for verifying thermal performance of the proposed design. The results are discussed in view of searching the best configuration for thermal control of device