Organic-inorganic hybrid materials for nanoimprint lithography

Nanoimprint lithography (NIL) technology has been focused on its wide variety of applications and good cost performance. It has also been indicated that the selection of materials depending on the application fields is important. In this research, we selected silicasol nanoparticles as inorganic materials and successfully dispersed them uniformly into photofunctional monomers with non-solvent systems. Dispersed silicasols were also treated with a photofunctional crosslinker and were mixed with other monomers to prepare various imprint materials. The UV-NIL performance, obtained by using an imprint test machine "LTNIP-5000" from Litho Tech Japan Co. showed greatly improved UV hardening properties and physical properties such as refractivity, thermal stability compared to organic (non-hybrid) materials. As a result, 200 nm line and space patterns were successfully imprinted with no shrinkage at pressure of 3.1 MPa and exposure doses of 1 J/cm2.