High throughput optical lithography by scanning a massive array of bowtie aperture antennas at near-field.

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.