Abstract:In order to engrave gravure plate with fine lines structures, conventional art used lithography with dry/wet etching. Lithography with dry/wet etching method allows to engrave lines with smooth concave shape, but its disadvantages include difficulty in controlling aspect ratio, high and uniform in large size process, substrate material limitation due to etching solution availability, and process complexity. We developed ultra-fast laser technology to directly engrave a stainless plate, a gravure plate, to be used for fabricating 23 in. metal-mesh touch panel by gravure offset printing process. The technology employs high energy pulse to ablate materials from a substrate. Because the ultra-fast laser pulse duration is shorter than the energy dissipation time between material lattices, there is no heating issue during the ablation process. Therefore, no volcano-type protrusion on the engraved line edges occurs, leading to good printing quality. After laser engraving, we then reduce surface roughness of the gravure plate using electro-polishing process. Diamond like carbon (DLC) coating layer is then added onto the surface to increase scratch resistance. We show that this procedure can fabricate gravure plate for gravure offset printing process with minimum printing linewidth 10.7 µm. A 23 in. metal-mesh pattern was printed using such gravure plate and fully functional touch panel was demonstrated in this work.

This article discusses the current status and achievements of R2R technology for large area nano-scaled optical devices developed at MSL/ITRI. Firstly, a single layer of nanostructure on polymer film is designed for anti-reflection purpose by finite difference time domain (FDTD) method in the visible light spectrum. The conical array with around 1 aspect ratio, like moth-eye shape and showing superior performance in the optical simulation, has been adapted for the R2R experiments. The development of R2R process includes roller machine design and fabrication, roller mold design and making, development of rolling imprint process, characterization of rolled devices. In this study, large area (200mm *200mm) Ni template was fabricated with DUV exposure, followed by dry etching and electroforming process, respectively. Then, the template was bonded on the roller mold with magnetic film to make nanostructure roller mold. With the delicate nanostructure roller mold, systematic experiments have been conducted on the home-made roller machine with various parameters, such as linear speed, dose rate, and material modifications. The duplicated nanostructure films show very good optical quality of anti-reflection (AR < 1%) and are in good agreement with the theoretical predictions. Besides, the duration of the roller mold has been highly promoted to hundreds of imprint in the UV embossing process.

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