Simulating fabrication and imprinting distortions in step-and-flash imprint lithography templates

Step-and-flash imprint lithography (SFIL) is a novel approach for producing chips with sub-45-nm features. The technology uses a quartz template to imprint a dispensed polymer solution on the device wafer in a 1 x pattern-transfer process. The accuracy of the imprint fabrication technology requires minimization of the errors associated with the template fabrication, appropriate dispensing of the polymer, and reduction of template distortion during the interaction with the polymer and the device wafer as a result of the imprint. In this paper, two key issues, template fabrication and polymer dispensing, are investigated with numerical models in order to characterize the response of system components during the SFIL process. The template distortion during fabrication is simulated using finite-element models and the polymer solution dispensing is modeled using computational fluid dynamics simulations. (C) 2004 Published by Elsevier B.V.