TiN coating/glass substrate system fabricated for hot-embossing stamp at multi-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 disadvantages of current Si and SiO₂ 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. To fabricate the stamp, firstly, several microns TiN coating is deposited on the glass by ion- beam deposition system, then 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.