Fabrication of polyimide micro/nano-structures based on contact-transfer and mask-embedded lithography

Polyimide materials are well known for their excellent mechanical and chemical stability which, as an adverse consequence, makes their fabrication processes much more difficult, especially in micro- and nano-scales. In this paper, we demonstrate an innovative and powerful method for fabricating micro/nano-structures on polyimides. The proposed method first adopts an imprinting approach to transfer a patterned metal film from a mold to a polymer layer coated on a polyimide layer. The patterned double polymer layers are then dry etched using the transferred metal pattern as an etching mask. Finally, polyimide structures are obtained by lifting off the top polymer layer and the metal film through wet etching. Experiments have been carried out and important parameters to achieve high pattern-transformation fidelity are determined. Fine structures of polyimides with a feature size of 500 nm and a total patterned area of 8 × 8 mm² are demonstrated. Advantages of the proposed method include low-temperature, low contact pressure, small feature size, high throughput and ease of in implementation. Most importantly, it is applicable for a large number of tough polymers which are difficult to deal with by other methods in terms of micro/nano-fabrication.