Wen X, Datta A, Traverso L M, Pan L, Xu X, Moon E E
School of Mechanical Engineering and Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906.
Center for Micro- and Nanoscale Research and Fabrication, Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, 230026, China.
Sci Rep. 2015 Nov 3;5:16192. doi: 10.1038/srep16192.
Optical lithography, the enabling process for defining features, has been widely used in semiconductor industry and many other nanotechnology applications. Advances of nanotechnology require developments of high-throughput optical lithography capabilities to overcome the optical diffraction limit and meet the ever-decreasing device dimensions. We report our recent experimental advancements to scale up diffraction unlimited optical lithography in a massive scale using the near field nanolithography capabilities of bowtie apertures. A record number of near-field optical elements, an array of 1,024 bowtie antenna apertures, are simultaneously employed to generate a large number of patterns by carefully controlling their working distances over the entire array using an optical gap metrology system. Our experimental results reiterated the ability of using massively-parallel near-field devices to achieve high-throughput optical nanolithography, which can be promising for many important nanotechnology applications such as computation, data storage, communication, and energy.
光学光刻作为定义特征的关键工艺，已在半导体行业和许多其他纳米技术应用中广泛使用。纳米技术的发展需要开发高通量光学光刻能力，以克服光学衍射极限并满足不断缩小的器件尺寸要求。我们报告了我们最近的实验进展，即利用蝴蝶结形孔径的近场纳米光刻能力大规模扩大无衍射光学光刻。通过使用光学间隙计量系统仔细控制整个阵列上的工作距离，同时采用创纪录数量的近场光学元件——一个由1024个蝴蝶结形天线孔径组成的阵列，来生成大量图案。我们的实验结果再次证明了使用大规模并行近场器件实现高通量光学纳米光刻的能力，这对于计算、数据存储、通信和能源等许多重要的纳米技术应用可能具有广阔前景。
