Soft lithographic printing of mesoscale periodic structures
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Authors
Deagen, Michael Edward
Issue Date
2018-12
Type
Electronic thesis
Thesis
Thesis
Language
ENG
Keywords
Materials engineering
Alternative Title
Abstract
Wetting regimes for residual-layer-free filling provide a guide to materials selection and design for multi-layer transfer molding, and the anisotropic dewetting behavior provided insights into the process for achieving selective filling of stamps. Plasma treatment was used to promote adhesion, and a size effect emerged at the nanoscale favoring multi-layer transfer at plasma doses orders of magnitude lower than recommended in the plasma bonding literature. Corona treatment, a scalable plasma bonding technique, facilitated multi-layer transfer of 70-nm linewidths across a wide range of exposures, and the etching of the stamp material at longer exposures further underscored the importance of brief treatments for successful transfer at the nanoscale. A novel implementation of dyne testing provided a side-by-side comparison of plasma and corona treatment, enabling the estimation of the corona power distribution based on spatio-temporal analysis of the wettability increase. This work brings the transfer molding process to previously unseen size scales through several key insights in wetting and adhesion and opens new opportunities for research in low-cost, multi-layer nano-patterning.
Description
December 2018
School of Engineering
School of Engineering
Full Citation
Publisher
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY