The UV-nanoimprint lithography equipment with multi-head imprinting unit for sub-50 nm half-pitch patterns

Nanoimprinting lithography (NIL) is a promising technology to produce sub-50 nm half-pitch features on silicon- and/or quartz-based substrates. It is well-known as the next generation lithography. Especially, the UV-nanoimprint lithography technology has advantages of the simple process, low cost, high replication fidelity and relatively high throughput. In this paper, chip-size multi-head imprinting unit with compliance stage and overlay/alignment system with moire and dual grating unit are proposed in order to fabricate sub-50 nm half-pitch patterns. These systems are set-up and performed in single-step nanoimprinting tool (ANT-4) which has several functional units for nanoimprinting process. Using the UV-NIL tool, 50 nm, 70 nm and 100 nm half-pitch dot and line patterns are obtained. Also, 20 nm overlay/alignment accuracy is obtained by means of the proposed method. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.