High-throughput Nano-Scale Patterning for Large-area Nanomanufacturing

人们对加工面积和速度都可扩展的纳米制造技术的兴趣和强烈需求与日俱增。需要这些技术来满足从电子到能源再到生物医学等广泛应用的不断增长的市场。例如，用于提高平板显示器亮度和能效的纳米结构，用于显示器和光伏设备的自清洁和抗反射表面，以及用于抵抗细菌生长的图案化表面(例如，模仿鱼翅上的图案)。尽管在各个层面都取得了进展，但能够满足高分辨率、高制造速度、低成本和大面积加工的通用纳米制造技术仍然缺乏。该奖项将为未来部署高通量纳米刻蚀铺平道路，用于半导体行业使用的深紫外光刻太昂贵而无法应用的应用。这项研究涉及多个科学和工程学科，包括纳米制造、光学设计、建模和模拟、表征和工艺开发。这些学科将被整合到课程开发和微型项目的开发中，为本科生和少数族裔学生提供动手研究的机会。光刻的分辨率受到光衍射限制。为了克服这一限制，早在2004年就引入了基于等离子体激元的光刻的新概念，随后利用本质上很小的等离子体激元波长的超透镜方法。然而，有一些重大挑战阻碍了这一领域的进展。例如，掩模的适当结构的设计是困难的，并且由于光刻胶曝光的近场性质，纳米结构(浅深度和粗糙图案)的质量非常低。该研究团队的目标是通过开发可靠的掩模和超透镜设计来缩小知识差距，并研究产生高质量纳米级图案的创新策略。他们将探索这种双曲线超材料的独特分散性，以实现纳米级的特征，其间距比光掩模上的间距要小得多。当采用新的滚轮光刻方法时，所提出的技术结合了光刻、软光刻和连续卷到卷和卷到板图案化技术的一些最佳特征，从而实现了用于实际应用的复杂的纳米结构。

There is an increasing interest and a strong need for nanomanufacturing technologies that are scalable both in processing area and speed. These technologies are needed to meet the growing markets in a wide range of applications from electronics to energy to biomedical. Examples include nanostructures to improve the brightness and power efficiency of flat panel displays, self-cleaning and anti-reflective surfaces for displays and photovoltaic devices, and patterned surfaces (for example, mimicking patterns on shark fins) to resist bacterial growth. Despite progress at various levels, a versatile nanofabrication technology that can meet the necessary requirements of high resolution, high fabrication speed, cost effectiveness and large area processing is lacking. This award will pave the way for future deployment of high-throughput nanopatterning for such applications for which the deep ultra-violet photolithography, used by the semiconductor industry, is too expensive to apply. This research involves several disciplines of science and engineering including nanomanufacturing, optical design, modeling and simulation, characterization and process development. These disciplines will be integrated into curriculum development and development of mini projects to give hands-on research opportunity for undergraduate and minority students.The resolution of photolithography is limited by the light diffraction limit. To overcome this limit, the new concept of plasmonics-based lithography was introduced as early as 2004 and followed later with the approach of hyperlens by taking advantage of intrinsically small plasmon wavelength. However there have been critical challenges impeding the progress of this field. For example, the design of the appropriate structures for masks is difficult and, due to the near-field nature of the photoresist exposure, the quality of the nanostructures (shallow depth and rough patterns) is very low. The research team aims to close the knowledge gap by developing reliable mask and hyperlens designs and investigate innovative strategies to produce high quality nanoscale patterns. They will explore unique dispersions of the hyperbolic metamaterial to achieve nanoscale features with pitch much reduced from that on the photomask. The proposed techniques, when implemented with a new roller lithography approach, combines some of the best features of photolithography, soft lithography, and continuous roll-to-roll and roll-to-plate patterning technologies toward realizing complex nanostructures for practical applications.