A versatile pattern inversion process based on thermal and soft UV nanoimprint lithography techniques

Si master molds are generally patterned by electron-beam lithography (EBL) that is known to be a time-consuming nanopatterning technique. Thus, developing mold duplication process based on high throughput technique such as nanoimprint lithography can be helpful in reducing its fabrication time and cost. Moreover, it could be of interest to get inverted patterns (holes instead of pillars) without changing the master EBL process. In this paper, we propose a two step process based on thermal nanoimprint lithography (T-NIL) (step 1) and soft UV assisted nanoimprint lithography (UV-NIL) (step 2) to invert a master EBL mold. After the two inversion steps, the grand-daughter Si mold exhibits the same pattern polarity as the EBL mold. For step 1, pattern transfer using ion beam etching (IBE) of a thin metallic underlayer is the critical step for dimension control due to the low NXR1020 resistance. For step 2, the optimized reactive ion etching (RIE) step allows transfer with good anisotropy even for nanostructures at the 50 nm-scale. For structures larger than 100 nm, this inversion process has been successfully applied to large field replication (up to 1.5 cm(2)) on whole wafer. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.