A Japanese team has developed a technique to build diamond moulds for what it calls nanoimprint lithography (NIL) to try to print rather than image features on chips.
As chips shrink, resist patterning on silicon wafers becomes increasingly critical. The team says NIL offers nanometre features over large areas with high throughput.
The combined team of researchers from the University of Tokyo and a Japanese Electrotechnical Laboratory in Ibaraki has developed a fine patterning technique for diamond that makes it a suitable candidate for use as a NIL mould.
In NIL, moulds need to describe very fine, sub-100nm patterns, but these patterns are often broken in the several imprint processes. Because diamond is a very hard material, it is resilient and not as prone to fine pattern breaking as previous materials tried.
Jun Taniguchi, research associate at the University of Tokyo and group leader, said: "Using a good electron beam lithography system, we have produced patterns at 100nm or below."
The team uses e-beam lithography in concert with polymethylmethacrylate and oxygen gas reactive ion etching to make the fine patterns in the diamond mould.
The team is currently preparing a paper describing techniques for patterning three-dimensional diamond moulds. Taniguchi says he thinks his team is the only group using diamonds in this way.
