Stress Analysis in Cooling Process for Thermal Nanoimprint Lithography with Imprinting Temperature and Residual Layer Thickness of Polymer Resist

Abstract

Nanoimprint lithography (NIL) is a next generation technology for fabrication of micrometer and nanometer scale patterns. There have been considerable attentions on NIL due to its potential abilities that enable cost-effective and high-throughput nanofabrication to the display device and semiconductor industry. Up to now there have been a lot of researches on thermal NIL, but most of them have been focused on polymer deformation in the molding process and there are very few studies on the cooling and demolding process. In this paper a cooling process of the polymer resist in thermal NIL is analyzed with finite element method. The modeling of cooling process for mold, polymer resist and substrate is developed. And the cooling process is numerically investigated with the effects of imprinting temperature and residual layer thickness of polymer resist on stress distribution of the polymer resist. The results show that the lower imprinting temperature, the higher the maximum von Mises stress and that the thicker the residual layer, the greater maximum von Mises stress.