Nanoimprint technology for patterning functional materials and its applications

摘要

Functional materials including metals, ceramics, plastics, and nanomaterials are now widely adopted in modern devices. To facilitate the fabrication of nanostructured functional materials, nanoimprint lithography (NIL) technology is developed. The nanoimprint technologies for patterning functional materials are reviewed in this paper. Versatile NIL-based methods have been developed according to the material properties of the target functional materials. Besides the NIL involving dry etching or lift-off process, we also introduce other NIL-based methods such as the direct NIL, reversal NIL, solid state electrochemical stamping, nanotransfer printing, sol-gel NIL and many other improved NIL for functional materials. These methods demonstrate various advantages. For example, the direct NIL facilitates the direct formation of functional metal or plastic nanostructures with a high reproducibility at the centimeter scale, the template stripping method aims to reduce the surface roughness of metal nanostructures to a few-angstrom scale. Besides, multilayer 3D metal/polymer/ceramic nanostructures can be readily achieved on many kinds of substrates by reversal NIL or nanotransfer printing. Moreover, the sol-gel NIL for ceramics, roll-to-roll process for plastics, and some other NIL-based methods for patterning functional materials and nanomaterials are introduced. The optical, and electrical properties of the nanostructured functional materials prepared by NIL are discussed. Additionally, the applications of these nanostructured functional materials are also introduced in this article. Overall, this review aims to inspire next-generation devices to be developed by NIL with versatile choices of imprinting processes and materials.