The laser-produced plasma is a compact and relatively inexpensive soft x-ray and extremeultraviolet (EUV) source. In this paper we describe a xenon liquid-jet laser-plasma source suitable for EUV lithography and proximity x-ray lithography (PXL). This specific source combines the advantages of the microscopic-liquid-jet target method and inert-gas, high-Z target material. EUV lithography at A ~...

Three-dimensional (3D) microstructures are essential elements in various technological applications, including optical coatings, [ 1 , 2 ] tissue engineering scaffolds, [ 3 ] microfl uidics, [ 4 ] energy storage devices, [ 5 , 6 ] plasmonics, [ 7 ] and photonic crystals. [ 8 , 9 ] While conventional methods, such as photo lithography and electron beam lithography, are costly and ineffective in ...

Optical lithography is a widely used printing method. In this process, light is used to etch a substrate. The exposed or unexposed areas on the substrate then define the pattern. In particular, the microchip industry uses lithography to produce smaller and smaller processors. However, classical optical lithography can only achieve a resolution comparable to the wave length of the light used @1–...

Zone-Plate-Array Lithography (ZPAL) is an optical-maskless-lithography technique, in which an array of tightly focused spots is formed on the surface of a substrate by means of an array of high-numerical-aperture zone plates. The substrate is scanned while an upstream spatial-light modulator, enabling “dot-matrix” style writing, modulates the light intensity in each spot. We have built a proof-...

All nanofabrication methods come with an intrinsic resolution limit, set by their governing physical principles and instrumentation. In the case of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography at 13.5 nm wavelength, this limit is set by light diffraction and is ≈3.5 nm. In the semiconductor industry, the feasibility of reaching this limit is not only a key factor for the current developments in lithog...

In recent years, directed self-assembly (DSA) has demonstrated tremendous potential to reduce cost for multiple patterning with fewer masks, especially for via patterning. DSA is considered as one of the next generation lithography candidates or complementary lithography techniques to extend 193i lithography further for the sub7 nm nodes. In this work, we focus on the simultaneous DSA guiding t...

We report the fabrication and characterization of nanoscale silicon field effect transistors using nanoimprint lithography. With this lithographic technique and dry etching, we have patterned a variety of nanoscale transistor features in silicon, including 100 nm wire channels, 250-nm-diam quantum dots, and ring structures with 100 nm ring width, over a 232 cm lithography field with good unifor...

Nanostencil lithography has a number of distinct benefits that make it an attractive nanofabrication processes, but the inability to fabricate features with nanometer precision has significantly limited its utility. In this paper, we describe a nanostencil lithography process that provides sub-15 nm resolution even for 40-nm thick structures by using a sacrificial layer to control the proximity...

The ability to coat surfaces with pre-determined patterns of biomolecules by soft lithography has found use in areas ranging from fundamental biology to translational medicine, such as tissue engineering and diagnostics. However, existing surface patterning techniques (e.g., microcontact printing and traditional lithography) are unable to pattern several biomolecules in a single step. Here we i...

In this paper, we report our recent work on preparing two-dimensional patterned microstructure arrays using three-dimensional colloidal crystals as templates, namely, colloidal crystal-assisted lithography. Two alternative processes are described and involved in colloidal crystal-assisted lithography. One is based upon imprinting the polymer films with three-dimensional silica colloidal crystal...