Publication

Nanobridge Stencil Enabling High Resolution Arbitrarily Shaped Metallic Thin Films on Various Substrates

Abstract

Stencil lithography (SL), which uses a perforated membrane as a reusable shadow mask to locally add material patterns on substrates provides a simple but versatile approach for the fabrication of functional devices on a large variety of substrate materials by physical vapor deposition (PVD). Mechanical stress induced by the accumulation of condensed material on the thin stencil membrane during the PVD step leads to stencil bending and breaking, therefore, suspended stencil membranes with arbitrary openings are, in practice, not possible. Here, a new approach to remedy this limitation is reported by introducing auxiliary bridges in stencils. These bridges prevent the suspended membrane from bending out of plane, thereby enabling aperture openings to have almost arbitrary geometry. These bridges are sufficiently narrow so that they do not entirely block the material deposition by PVD and thus create a continuous material pattern by taking advantage of the blurring effect. The successful metal deposition through the designed nanobridge stencil on a wide range of substrate materials underlines the usability and the versatility of the proposed stencil design. The work presented here provides a versatile fabrication method to produce arbitrarily shaped metal patterns that were previously impossible due to the topological constraints of nanostencils.

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Related concepts (32)
Chemical vapor deposition
Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is a vacuum deposition method used to produce high-quality, and high-performance, solid materials. The process is often used in the semiconductor industry to produce thin films. In typical CVD, the wafer (substrate) is exposed to one or more volatile precursors, which react and/or decompose on the substrate surface to produce the desired deposit. Frequently, volatile by-products are also produced, which are removed by gas flow through the reaction chamber.
Physical vapor deposition
Physical vapor deposition (PVD), sometimes called physical vapor transport (PVT), describes a variety of vacuum deposition methods which can be used to produce thin films and coatings on substrates including metals, ceramics, glass, and polymers. PVD is characterized by a process in which the material transitions from a condensed phase to a vapor phase and then back to a thin film condensed phase. The most common PVD processes are sputtering and evaporation.
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