Improving nanoimprint lithography stamps for the 10 nm features

Nanoimprint lithography has been demonstrated to produce structures down to a size range of approximately 10 nm. However, such resolution has only been obtained when printing small areas. A prerequisite for producing such structures repeatedly over a large area is a good stamp, of which the quality does not deteriorate with usage. The smaller the features on the stamp the more important are the interactions between stamp and polymer layer. A stamp rich in small structures will effectively show a surface area enlargement, which a generally leads to an adhesion of the polymer to the stamp. This makes a subsequent imprint impossible without troublesome and time-consuming cleaning. The anti-adhesion properties of Si- or SiO/sub 2/-based stamps can be improved by binding fluorinated silanes covalently to the surface. In this paper we demonstrate that the deposition procedure as well as the environment during deposition are important with respect to the quality of the molecular layer.