BLOCK-COPOLYMER LITHOGRAPHY - PERIODIC ARRAYS OF SIMILAR-TO-10(11) HOLES IN 1 SQUARE CENTIMETER

Dense periodic arrays of holes and dots have been fabricated in a sili con nitride-coated silicon wafer. The holes are 20 nanometers across, 40 nanometers apart, and hexagonally ordered with a polygrain structur e that has an average grain size of 10 by 10. Spin-coated diblock copo lymer thin films with well-ordered spherical or cylindrical microdomai ns were used as the templates. The microdomain patterns were transferr ed directly to the underlying silicon nitride layer by two complementa ry techniques that resulted in opposite tones of the patterns. This pr ocess opens a route for nanometer-scale surface patterning by means of spontaneous self-assembly in synthetic materials on length scales tha t are difficult to obtain by standard semiconductor lithography techni ques.