Existing techniques for electron- and ion-beam lithography, routinely employed for nanoscale device fabrication and mask/mold prototyping, do not simultaneously achieve efficient (low fluence) exposure and high resolution. We report lithography using neon ions with fluence <1 ion/nm(2), ∼1000× more efficient than using 30 keV electrons, and resolution down to 7 nm half-pitch. This combination o...

As lithography quickly approaches its limits with current technologies, a host of new ideas is being proposed in hopes of pushing lithography to new levels of performance. The work presented in this thesis explores the use of an immersion scheme to improve the performance of a maskless lithographic technique known as Zone-Plate-Array Lithography (ZPAL). This is believed to be the first implemen...

Contact thermal lithography is a method for fabricating patterns based on thermal effects. In contrast to photolithography, where resolution is limited by the wavelength of light used in the exposure process, thermal lithography is limited by thermal diffusion. A traditional metal-glass photomask is brought into contact with a wafer coated with a thermally sensitive polymer. The mask-wafer comb...

We use the soft lithography technique to fabricate a polymeric waveguide Bragg grating filter. Master grating structure is patterned by e-beam lithography. Using an elastomeric stamp and capillary action, uniform grating structures with very thin residual layers are transferred to the UV curable polymer without the use of an imprint machine. The waveguide layer based on BCB optical polymer is f...

The interest in micro- and nano-devices based on biodegradable polymers for in vivo applications is growing rapidly and the key to these applications lies in the fashioning of features analogous to the size of cells. This paper presents fabrication techniques for leveraging micro- and nanostructures on biodegradable polymers. Innovative approaches such as replication molding, laser interference...

We present a comparison of three different technologies for the fabrication of microoptical elements with arbitrary surfaces. We used direct laser writing, binary mask lithography in combination with reactive ion etching, and graytone lithography.

Atom lithography was invented in the last decade at Bell Labs, where the possibility of producing nanostructures with laser manipulated neutral Na atoms was demonstrated for the first time [1]. Atom lithography [2] is in principle similar to optical lithography, the main difference being that the roles of light and matter are reversed each other. While in optical lithography matter (material ma...