Direct-Write Photolithography for Cylindrical Tooling Fabrication in Roll-to-Roll Microcontact Printing

Abstract

The scale-up of microcontact printing (lCP) to a roll-to-roll technique for large-scale surface patterning requires scalable tooling for continuous pattern printing with lmscale features (e.g., 1-50 lm). Here, we examine the process of creating such a tool using an optical direct-write or "maskless" method working on a rotating cylindrical substrate. A predictive model of pattern formation is presented along with experimental results to examine the key control factors for this process. It is shown that factors can be modulated to vary the cross-sectional shape in addition to feature height and width. This feature can then be exploited to improve the robustness of the final printing process.

Roll-to-Roll Microcontact Printing of Flexible Aluminum Substrates Using Octadecylphosphonic Acid (ODPA)

“…The need for continuous cylindrical tools with appropriate micro-scale features and substrate uniformity to produce consistent, large area printing has been addressed by Petrzelka and Hardt [11] and Nietner and Hardt [12]. Using a novel centrifugal casting and cylindrical mask-less patterning method, seamless cylindrical PDMS tools, such that shown in Fig.…”