Soft lithography on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
In
Soft lithography has some unique advantages over other forms of lithography (such as photolithography and electron beam lithography). They include the following:
*Lower cost than traditional photolithography in mass production
*Well-suited for applications in
In technology
Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, scien ...
, soft lithography is a family of techniques for fabricating or replicating structure
A structure is an arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in a material object or system, or the object or system so organized. Material structures include man-made objects such as buildings and machines and natural objects such a ...
s using "elastomeric stamps, molds, and conformable photomasks". It is called "soft" because it uses elastomeric materials, most notably PDMS PDMS may refer to:
* Palm Desert Middle School, a middle school in Palm Desert, California
* Plant Design Management System
* Plasma desorption mass spectrometry
* Point-Defence Missile System
* Polydimethylsiloxane
Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), ...
.
Soft lithography is generally used to construct features measured on the micrometer to nanometer scale. According to Rogers and Nuzzo (2005), development of soft lithography expanded rapidly from 1995 to 2005. Soft lithography tools are now commercially available.
Types
*PDMS stamp
PDMS stamps are pieces of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a silicone, that have been patterned usually against a master mask to form a relief pattern used in soft lithography. This PDMS stamp can be used in either its current form as a relief surface ...
* Microcontact printing
Microcontact printing (or μCP) is a form of soft lithography that uses the relief patterns on a master polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) stamp or Urethane rubber micro stamp to form patterns of self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of ink on the surface of ...
* Multilayer soft lithography
Multilayer soft lithography (MSL) is a fabrication process in which microscopic chambers, channels, valves and vias are molded within bonded layers of elastomer.Commercial PDMS stampscamold materials such as optical adhesivein a sequential process ...
Advantages
Soft lithography has some unique advantages over other forms of lithography (such as photolithography and electron beam lithography). They include the following:
*Lower cost than traditional photolithography in mass production
*Well-suited for applications in biotechnology
Biotechnology is the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms, cells, parts thereof and molecular analogues for products and services. The term ''biotechnology'' was first used ...
*Well-suited for applications in plastic electronics
Organic electronics is a field of materials science concerning the design, synthesis, characterization, and application of organic molecules or polymers that show desirable electronic properties such as conductivity. Unlike conventional inorgan ...
*Well-suited for applications involving large or nonplanar (nonflat) surfaces
*More pattern-transferring methods than traditional lithography techniques (more "ink" options)
*Does not need a photo-reactive surface to create a nanostructure
*Smaller details than photolithography in laboratory settings (~30 nm vs ~100 nm). The resolution depends on the mask used and can reach 6 nm.
See also
*Nanolithography
Nanolithography (NL) is a growing field of techniques within nanotechnology dealing with the engineering (patterning e.g. etching, depositing, writing, printing etc) of nanometer-scale structures on various materials.
The modern term reflects on ...
References
Further reading
* * * * {{Nanolith Lithography (microfabrication)