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166 Updates in Advanced Lithography

**Chapter 7**

**Soft UV Nanoimprint Lithography and Its Applications**

Large-area nanopatterning technology has demonstrated high potential which can signifi‐ cantly enhance the performance of many devices and products, such as LEDs, solar cells, hard disk drives, laser diodes, display, etc [1]. For example, nano-patterned sapphire substrates (NPSS) and photonic crystals (PhC) have been considered as the most effective approaches to improve the light output efficiency (internal quantum efficiency and external quantum efficiency) of LEDs and beam shaping [2,3]. The solar cells with sub-micro anti-reflective coating exhibited higher photocurrent and higher power conversion efficiency compared to those without nanostructures [4]. Moreover, the ability to produce large-area micro- and nanostructures on non-planar surfaces is of importance for many applications such as optics, optoelectronics, nanophotonics, imaging technology, NEMS, and microfluidics [5]. However, creating large-area nanostructures on curved or non-planar surfaces are extremely difficult using existing patterning approaches. Furthermore, a variety of existing nanopatterning technologies such as electron beam lithography (ELB), optical lithography, interference lithography (IL), etc., cannot cope with all the practical demands of industrial applications with respect to high resolution, high throughput, low cost, large area, and patterning on nonflat and curved surface. Therefore, new high volume nanomanufacturing technology strongly needs to be exploited and developed so as to meet the tremendous requires of rapid growing

Nanoimprint lithography (NIL) has now been considered as a promising nanopatterning method with low cost, high throughput and high resolution, especially for producing the largearea micro/nano scale patterns and complex 3-D structures and as well as high-aspect-ratio features. Due to these outstanding advantages, it was accepted by International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) in 2009 for the 16 and 11 nm nodes, scheduled for industrial manufacturing in 2013. Toshiba has validated NIL for 22 nm and beyond. NIL has also been listed as one of 10 emerging technologies that will strongly impact the world by

> © 2013 Lan; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,

distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2013 Lan; licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Hongbo Lan

**1. Introduction**

markets.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/56186

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter
