Roller-based laser assisted direct imprinting for nanofabrication

This paper reports an improved nanofabrication method based on laser-assisted direct imprinting (LADI) technology. The key element in this improvement is to introduce a quartz roller into the LADI process. The quartz roller optically focuses an incident UV laser light into a line onto a silicon substrate, and mechanically compresses a quartz mold against the silicon substrate. Under the action of both laser melting and mechanical pressure, the mold can imprint into the silicon and transfer the mold´s surface features directly to the silicon substrate. This roller-type LADI approach has several significant advantages as compared to the original planar type LADI. It transforms the LADI process into a large-area, continuous, and high throughput nano-fabrication method. Experimental tests in this work demonstrate the direct fabrication of nano-structures of 500 nm line width with an imprinting speed of 5 times 60 mm² per minute in a continuous configuration.