Nanopatterned surfaces are of central importance to a variety of areas and applications, such as computer chip architectures, tissue interfacing, biosensors, light management and plasmonics, among others. Typically, the various approaches to nanopatterning of surfaces, including silicon, are broken into two major classes: top-down methods such as photolithography, e-beam lithography and scanning force microscopy variants, and bottom-up synthetic techniques, including self-assembly. Since lithography is the single most expensive step in computer chip manufacturing, the use of self-assembled block copolymers (BCPs) templates on surfaces is being seriously considered by the semiconductor industry to pattern sub-20 nm features on a semiconductor surface; the Industry Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) terms this approach ‘directed self-assembly’, or DSA. Here, we will describe the remarkable versatility of using BCPs, polymers that contain sufficient chemical information to form highly ordered templates over large areas. These templates, which range from arrays of parallel lines, to dots, to much more complex Moiré superlattice patterns, can be converted into functional materials, such as metal nanostructures, molecules-on-silicon, and plasmonic stamps.

Self-assembly of block copolymer nanopatterns on surfaces

255th National Meeting (2018)

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