Fabrication of diamond tip cantilever and its application to tribo-nanolithography

Nano-scale fabrication of silicon substrate based on the use of atomic force microscopy (AFM) was demonstrated. A specially designed cantilever with diamond tip, allowing the formation of damaged layer on silicon substrate by a simple scratching process, has been applied instead of conventional silicon cantilever for scanning. A thin damaged layer forms in the substrate at the diamond tip-sample junction along scanning path of the tip. The damaged layer withstands against wet chemical etching in aqueous KOH solution. Diamond tip acts as a patterning tool like mask film for lithography process. Hence these sequential processes, called tribo-nanolithography, TNL, can fabricate 2D or 3D micro structures in nanometer range. This study demonstrates the novel fabrication processes of the micro cantilever and diamond tip as a tool for TNL using micro-patterning, wet chemical etching and CVD. The developed TNL tools show outstanding machinability against single crystal silicon wafer. Hence, they are expected to have a possibility for industrial applications as a micro-to-nano machining tool.