Developing Roll-to-Roll Nanoimprint Lithography as a Viable Nanomanufacturing Technology

纳米技术的进步使研究人员能够探索许多新的材料系统和器件结构在纳米尺度和减少的尺寸。微纳米结构的光刻技术对于开发这种结构及其新的应用至关重要。纳米压印光刻（NIL）在过去的十年中已经成为一种非常有前途的纳米结构制造技术。另一方面，目前的工艺和生产能力在许多领域仍然远远不能满足实际应用的需求。在生物芯片、数据存储和平板显示器领域中的商业相关应用大多需要高得多的工艺生产量，以证明与进入纳米范围相关的成本和制造要求是合理的。从材料和工艺的角度来看，基于原始纳米压印方案的高速压印具有根本的限制。本研究的目的是通过开发连续卷对卷纳米压印光刻（R2RNIL）技术来解决纳米纤维的瓶颈。R2RNIL技术继承了传统NIL工艺的高分辨率特征，因为它也是基于机械压印方法，但纳米图案化的速度提高了一个数量级以上。为了展示其对纳米制造社会的潜在影响，我们建议将R2RNIL技术应用于与有机电子和纳米光子学相关的一些测试平台，在这些测试平台上，R2R技术对于大面积和低成本应用的这些设备的制造是必不可少的。该项目需要一个多学科的方法，并将涉及各级学生研究人员，包括本科生。PI将鼓励和促进学生参与跨学科的研究，并将在本研究项目中涉及电气工程，机械工程和高分子科学与工程的研究生。将为该项目建造的原型设备不仅将促进我们的研究活动，而且还将作为课堂教学和相关主题的宝贵演示工具。该项目取得的进展和新发现将在网站上公布，以便向广大科学界传播。通过向更广泛的科学界提供一种真正简单，低成本和高通量的纳米光刻技术，它不仅有助于迅速扩散从这些新发展中获得的知识，而且通过与来自不同领域的研究人员的互动，我们将能够确定许多新的重要应用。

Advances in Nanotechnologies have enabled researchers to explore many new material systems and device structures in nanoscale and in reduced dimensions. Lithography for micro- and nanofabrication is of utmost importance for exploiting such structures as well as their new applications. Nanoimprint Lithography (NIL) has emerged as a very promising technique over the past decade for nanostructure fabrication. On the other hand, the current process and throughput in NIL is still far from meeting demands of practical applications in many areas. Commercially relevant applications in the areas of biochips, data storage, and flat panel display mostly require much higher process throughput to justify the cost and manufacturing requirement associated with entering the nano" regime. High-speed imprinting based on the original nanoimprint schemes have fundamental limitations from a material and process point of view. It is the objective of this proposed research to address the bottleneck in nanofabrication by developing continuous Roll-to-Roll NanoImprinting Lithography (R2RNIL) technology. The R2RNIL technique inherits the high-resolution feature of the traditional NIL process because it is also based on a mechanical embossing approach, but with a speed increased by more than an order of magnitude for nanopatterning. To demonstrate its potential impact to the nanomanufacturing society, we propose to apply the R2RNIL technique to a few testbeds related to organic electronic and nanophotonics, where it is commonly accepted that R2R technology is essential for the manufacturing of these devices for large area and low cost applications.Integrating research into education is another major effort of this program. The project requires a multidisciplinary approach, and will involve student researchers at all levels, including undergraduate students. The PI will encourage and promote students' participation in interdisciplinary researches, and will involve graduate students both in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Macromolecular Science and Engineering in this research project. The prototype equipment that will be constructed for this project will not only facilitate our research activities, but will also serves as a valuable demonstration tool in teaching this and related topics in classroom. Progress and new findings made in the project will be made available on website for dissemination to the general scientific community. By providing a truly simple, low-cost and high-throughput nanolithography technique to the broader scientific community, it will not only help to rapidly proliferate the knowledge gained from these new development, but also through the interaction with researchers from diverse fields we will be able to identify many new important applications that can be enabled by such a technology.