Thermal roll to roll nanoimprint using replica mould made by UV curable resin

Thermal nanoimprint lithography (T-NIL), in which thermoplastics are used as transfer substrates, is expected to be a nextgeneration technique for the high-throughput fabrication of nanopatterns. Thermoplastics are less expensive than the UV-curable resins that are used for UV violet nanoimprinting. Furthermore, a wide variety of thermoplastics are available with desirable properties such as transparency, chemical durability, or high hardness. In the T-NIL process, master moulds made of silicon or quartz substrates are normally used because of their high resolution. However, cost of fabricating such master moulds is high because of the complexity of the fabrication processes. Furthermore, silicon and quartz are not flexible, so it is difficult to perform thermal roll-to-roll nanoimprinting (T-R2RNIL) by using a master mould. We performed T-R2RNIL by using a flexible replica mould made of a special UV-curable resin, instead of a flexible nickel mould, typically used for T-R2RNIL. We succeeded in fabricating a submicron line-and-space pattern by using the replica mould in T-R2RNIL without any release agent. We believe that our technique will be helpful in reducing the cost of moulds for T-R2RNIL.