We combine chemical lift-off lithography (CLL) with large arrays of polymer pens with sub-20-nm tips, developing polymer pen chemical lift-off lithography (PPCLL). We demonstrated the feasibility of PPCLL with experiments using v-shaped polymer pen arrays and associated simulations. Simulation results show a nanometer-scale quadratic relationship between the contact linewidth and two variables: base linewidth of the polymer pen and vertical compression. We invented a supporting arm system and designed a series of v-shaped polymer pens with known height differences to control precisely the relative vertical position of each polymer pens at sub-20-nm scale, which mimicked a high-precision scanning stage. In this way, we successfully obtained linear array patterns with linewidths from sub-50-nm to sub-500-nm with minimum sub-20-nm linewidth increment tunability. The CLL pattern linewidth perfectly matched the simulations. These results suggest that through the proper design of the supporting arms to suitable positions and the base linewidth of the polymer pen arrays, one can completely eliminate the need for the scanning stage system in PPCLL to increase the throughput and to reduce cost. We also showed that PPCLL can be used to design and to fabricate DNA microarrays efficiently by backfilling the patterns after PPCLL with probe DNA, and subsequently hybridizing with complementary target sequences.

Polymer pen chemical lift-off lithography

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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