Direct soft UV-NIL with resist incorporating carbon nanotubes

As a potential candidate for the next generation of nanolithography, nanoimprint lithography (NIL) has drawn ever-increasing worldwide attention. It involves physical contact to overcome the optical limits occurring in sub-100 nm photolithography. Affordable tool cost is one of major attractive points of NIL. This work proposes the idea of incorporating carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in the resin used for ultraviolet nanoimprinting (UV-NIL). CNTs can make the resin electrically conductive when mixed with it. Patterns imprinted in the CNT-mixed resist can then be used to replace conductive metal structures directly. This enhances the productivity of basic UV-NIL where the imprinted patterns are used as sacrificial etch masks. In this work, several types of CNTs were purified chemically and dispersed before being mixed with UV-NIL resin using ultrasonic vibration. On drops of CNT-mixed resin, soft UV-NIL was performed using a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) stamp with a minimum feature size in the range of 200 nm. Even with increased resin viscosity due to the addition of CNTs, UV imprinting down to 200 nm was successfully done with moderate pattern fidelity. The loading rate of nanotubes should be minimized to prevent the increased viscosity from degrading the pattern transfer resolution. The electrical conductivity of CNT-mixed resist increases with the loading of CNTs. Therefore, the trade-off between the electrical properties and pattern transfer resolution needs to be optimized carefully.