Ultralarge-area block copolymer lithography via soft graphoepitaxy

We introduce soft-graphoepitaxy, a cost-effective, truly scalable, ultralarge-area block copolymer lithography. Soft graphoepitaxy employs a disposable photoresist prepattern attainable by conventional lithography, such as ArF lithography or I-line lithography, to direct lateral nanodomain ordering in block copolymer thin films. Since the organic photoresist prepattern is readily disposable, this approach provides laterally ordered self-assembled nanopatterns and corresponding pattern transferred functional nanostructures without any trace of the structure directing prepattern. Furthermore, the microscale photoresist pattern can be transformed into a sub-30 nm scale ultrafine lamellar pattern over an arbitrary large area via a scalable soft-graphoepitaxy principle.