Hot embossing of polymer nanochannels using PMMA moulds

A novel hot embossing method is developed to fabricate polymer nanochannels. The pattern on the silicon nanomould is transferred to polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) plates, and then polyethylene terephthalate (PET) nanochannels are embossed by using the PMMA mould. The use of the PMMA intermediate mould can extremely increase the device yield of the expensive silicon nanomould. To avoid the use of nanolithography, a method based on UV-lithography techniques for fabricating silicon nanomoulds with sub-micrometer width was put forward. 1 PMMA mould can be used to repeatedly emboss at least 30 PET substrates without damage and obvious deformation. Good pattern fidelity of PET nanochannels was obtained at the optimized embossing temperature of 90 °C. For an 808 nm-wide and 195 nm-deep nanochannel, the variations in width and depth between PET nanochannels and PMMA moulds were 1.8 and 2.5 %, respectively. The reproducibility was also evaluated, and the relative standard deviations in width and depth of 5 PET nanochannels were 5.1 and 7.3 %, respectively.