TiN coating/glass substrate system fabricated for hot-embossing stamp at sub-micron scale

For the hot-embossing lithography, imprinting stamp with long-life span, good anti-wear property and precise geometrical shape, is much expected for pushing forward the technology to industrial application. By analyzing existing disadvantages of current Si and SiO ₂ imprinting stamps, this paper presents TiN coating/glass substrate system as the stamp material, in which the glass plates serves as substrate and the hard TiN coating is fabricated for the nano-patterns. For fabricating the stamp, first several microns TiN coatings are deposited on the glass by ion-beam deposition system. Then for TiN/glass system, focused ion beam etching system is used to fabricate a series of nano-patterns on the TiN coating. The primary hot-embossing imprinting results indicate good results for PMMA. Hereby it is believed that conventional hard coating TiN could be potentially a good choice for realizing the long-life imprinting and improving the life duration of the imprinting stamp greatly.