Imprinted polymer stamps for UV-NIL

Thermal step and stamp nanoimprint lithography (SSIL) offers an alternative to fabricate transparent polymer stamps for UV-imprinting. The fabrication process does not require any other subsequent steps, e.g. dry etching or anti adhesive coating. In this work, we have manufactured UV-stamp by combining patterns of two different silicon masters. The patterns of the silicon masters were transferred into resin coated quartz plate by sequential imprinting. The first master consisted gratings with 50 nm features and the second master consisted dot arrays of 350 nm diameter features. The novel idea is the ability to create a large UV-stamp using a combination of small masters. Thus fabricated UV-stamps were used for demonstrating step and repeat UV-imprinting. The quality of the UV-stamps and imprints were analyzed by AFM. High fidelity patterns were achieved in respect to patterns in the original silicon master. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.