High throughput optical lithography by scanning a massive array of bowtie aperture antennas at near-field

Abstract

Optical lithography, the enabling process for defining features, has been widely used in semiconductor industry and many other nanotechnology applications. Advances of nanotechnology require developments of high-throughput optical lithography capabilities to overcome the optical diffraction limit and meet the ever-decreasing device dimensions. We report our recent experimental advancements to scale up diffraction unlimited optical lithography in a massive scale using the near field nanolithography capabilities of bowtie apertures. A record number of near-field optical elements, an array of 1,024 bowtie antenna apertures, are simultaneously employed to generate a large number of patterns by carefully controlling their working distances over the entire array using an optical gap metrology system. Our experimental results reiterated the ability of using massively-parallel near-field devices to achieve high-throughput optical nanolithography, which can be promising for many important nanotechnology applications such as computation, data storage, communication, and energy.

Resonant Effects in Nanoscale Bowtie Apertures

“…This has generated significant theoretical and experimental interest 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 . The intense confined near-field allows nanoscale ridge apertures to be used for nanolithography 16 17 , data storage 18 , bio-chemical sensing 19 and many other areas where high optical resolution and field enhancement are critical. The bowtie aperture is one type of ridge aperture.…”

Plasmonic Lithography: Recent Progress

“…Several other research groups have also presented comparable fabrication results using the same plasmonic bowtie aperture structures . Meanwhile Zhang's group described a different approach, namely the flying plasmonic lens in the near field.…”

Reproducible Plasmonic Nanopyramid Array of Various Metals for Highly Sensitive Refractometric and Surface-Enhanced Raman Biosensing

“… 32 Compared to chemical synthesis, physical preparation is more promising for LSPR sensors because of the controllable interspace of nanostructures and non-contamination of the metal surface. In physical preparations, e-beam lithography, 33 focused ion beam lithography, 34 and photolithography 35 can realize the precise control of size, shape, and interspace among the metal nanostructures, but they still can not provide low-cost production of large-area nanostructures. Nanosphere lithography, 36 , 37 template stripping, 38 elastic soft lithography (ESL) 39 are the next-generation approaches that provide cheap production of large-area nanostructures.…”