Despite a decade of efforts to extend nanoimprint lithography (NIL)’s library of patternable media beyond polymeric materials, nanoimprinting of inorganic single-crystalline semiconductors has been restricted due to recrystallization effects of heat-based NIL approaches, curtailing its optoelectronic properties. To resolve these challenges, this project investigates Metal-assisted Electrochemical Nanoimprinting (Mac-Imprint) of Silicon which exploits wet-chemistry and catalysis to selectively induce anisotropic etching at the interface of a semiconductor and a metal-coated stamp at room temperature. By exploring advanced stamp materials composed of mesoporous polymeric materials - traditionally used in water filtration and purification – it is sought to promote diffusion and enhance the process performance of Mac-Imprint (i.e. resolution, throughput, uniformity). At the fundamental level, an understanding of the scaling of the effective diffusion constant of this new class of metal-coated tortuous mesoporous stamp materials with sub-50 nm pore sizes is pursued and correlated it to the Mac-Imprint’s process performance. As the proposed length scale of the stamp’s pores enters the range of the Debye length, it restricts diffusion and imposes a physical limit to throughput and resolution of Mac-Imprint. Thus, this presentation examines process-structure relationships of Mac-Imprint that depart from classical mass transport models and account for the complexity of the stamp’s geometry and its redox electrochemistry mechanism.

Mesoporous polymeric stamp materials for large-area electrochemical nanoimprinting of silicon

ACS Spring 2022

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