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

有一个越来越多的兴趣和强烈的需要，纳米制造技术，可扩展的处理面积和速度。需要这些技术来满足从电子到能源到生物医学的广泛应用中不断增长的市场。例子包括纳米结构，以提高平板显示器的亮度和功率效率，显示器和光伏器件的自清洁和抗反射表面，以及图案化表面（例如，模仿鲨鱼鳍上的图案）以抵抗细菌生长。尽管在各个层面上取得了进展，但仍然缺乏能够满足高分辨率、高制造速度、成本效益和大面积加工的必要要求的通用纳米制造技术。该奖项将为未来部署高通量纳米图案化的应用铺平道路，因为半导体行业使用的深紫外光刻技术太昂贵而无法应用。这项研究涉及科学和工程的几个学科，包括纳米制造，光学设计，建模和仿真，表征和工艺开发。这些学科将被整合到课程开发和小型项目的开发中，为本科生和少数民族学生提供动手研究的机会。光刻的分辨率受到光衍射极限的限制。为了克服这一限制，早在2004年就引入了基于等离子体的光刻的新概念，随后通过利用本质上小的等离子体波长来采用超透镜的方法。然而，一些重大挑战阻碍了这一领域的进展。例如，用于掩模的适当结构的设计是困难的，并且由于光致抗蚀剂曝光的近场性质，纳米结构（浅深度和粗糙图案）的质量非常低。该研究团队旨在通过开发可靠的掩模和超透镜设计来缩小知识差距，并研究创新策略以生产高质量的纳米级图案。 他们将探索双曲超材料的独特色散，以实现纳米级特征，其间距比光掩模上的间距小得多。所提出的技术，当实现一个新的辊光刻方法，结合了一些最好的功能，光刻，软光刻，和连续的卷到卷和卷到板图案化技术实现复杂的纳米结构的实际应用。

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.