EV Group introduces nanoimprint lithography process
High throughput and cost-of-ownership advantages for substrates up to 200mm
EV Group (EVG), a supplier of wafer bonding and lithography equipment for the MEMS, nanotechnology and semiconductor markets, today introduced its SmartNIL large-area nanoimprint lithography (NIL) process.
Available on all EV Group NIL platforms, including mask aligners as well as the industry benchmark EVG720 and newly available EVG7200 UV-NIL systems, SmartNIL provides a low-cost, large-area and high-volume-manufacturing solution for a variety of advanced devices including: photonic-based devices such as LEDs, lasers and photovoltaics, micro arrays and nano-devices for medical devices and bioengineered applications, and advanced storage media, including newly emerging forms of non-volatile memory (NVM)
"SmartNIL is built on more than 15 years of NIL experience at EVG that includes the largest installed base of NIL systems worldwide, and is the only NIL technology currently used in high-volume manufacturing on substrates up to 200mm today," stated Paul Lindner, executive technology director at EV Group.
He added: "With our new EVG7200 UV-NIL system, which has industry-leading resolution down to 20nm in volume production, EVG brings the advanced soft stamp and imprint capability of SmartNIL to larger substrates and smaller geometries. This enables our customers to achieve even greater cost-of-ownership benefits and realize the full manufacturing potential of nanoimprint lithography."
SmartNIL offers many benefits says EVG. Photonic devices, such as photovoltaics, LEDs, laser diodes and optical sensors, rely on the nano-scale manipulation of light to achieve optimal performance. This light manipulation can be tailored through the use of nano-scale structures such as photonic crystals, gratings, phase-shift structures and waveguides. In bioengineered applications, nano-scale manufacturing processes are a requirement, since most biologic events begin at the nanometer scale
For both applications, traditional writing methods for producing nano-scale features either have extremely low throughput and, therefore, cannot be easily scaled up for cost-efficient production (such as electron-beam writing) or have sufficient throughput but are too cost-prohibitive, such as stepper systems for optical lithography. Certain photonic and bioengineered applications can also realise greater throughput and cost of ownership benefits from the ability to pattern 3D structures or different height levels in a single step-which can best be accomplished with a soft-stamp UV-NIL approach.
