Polymeric sidewall transfer lithography

This work is to demonstrate a low cost and time-conserving technique to create nano-trenches by transferring nano-scale polymeric sidewalls into substrate. The polymeric sidewall is a vertically spreading layer deposited by spin-coating a polymer solution on a vertical template. By varying processing parameters such as the solution concentration or the spin-coating speed, the dimension of the sidewall can be changed, which, after pattern transfer, also changes the nano-trench dimension. In this work, high-resolution trenches of about 15 nm have been achieved after transferring straight line sidewalls into substrate. Other than straight line sidewall patterns, this method also fabricates ring-shaped patterns including circles, squares, and concentric squares. With various shapes of sidewall patterns, this technique has a potential to implement other practical applications such as fabricating high-resolution nanoimprint molds of 15 nm.