title: Flexure-based Roll-to-roll Platform: A Practical Solution for Realizing Large-area Microcontact Printing.
abstract: A continuous roll-to-roll microcontact printing (MCP) platform promises large-area nanoscale patterning with significantly improved throughput and a great variety of applications, e.g. precision patterning of metals, bio-molecules, colloidal nanocrystals, etc. Compared with nanoimprint lithography, MCP does not require a thermal imprinting step (which limits the speed and material choices), but instead, extreme precision with multi-axis positioning and misalignment correction capabilities for large area adaptation. In this work, we exploit a flexure-based mechanism that enables continuous MCP with 500 nm precision and 0.05 N force control. The fully automated roll-to-roll platform is coupled with a new backfilling MCP chemistry optimized for high-speed patterning of gold and silver. Gratings of 300, 400, 600 nm line-width at various locations on a 4-inch plastic substrate are fabricated at a speed of 60 cm/min. Our work represents the first example of roll-to-roll MCP with high reproducibility, wafer scale production capability at nanometer resolution. The precision roll-to-roll platform can be readily applied to other material systems.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, N.T.,Hong Kong SAR, China.
authors.forename: Xi
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, N.T.,Hong Kong SAR, China.
authors.forename: Huihua
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, N.T.,Hong Kong SAR, China.
authors.forename: Jiyi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.affiliation: 1] Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of HongKong, N.T., Hong Kong SAR, China [2] Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, N.T.,Hong Kong SAR, China.
authors.forename: Ni
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, N.T.,Hong Kong SAR, China.
authors.forename: Shih-Chi
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Chen