Design and prototype : a manufacturing system for the soft lithography technique

Abstract

Ever since 1998 when the term "soft lithography" was first created, soft lithography techniques have drawn close attention of the academia and the industry. Micro contact printing is by far the most widely used soft lithography technique in the industry. The objective of this research project is to design and prototype a micro contact printing machine which could achieve high scalability, feature resolution and production rate. It should also fulfill quality requirements, in terms of minimizing the tool deformation and air trapping furing printing. A reel-to-reel design with wipers to create linear propagation during stamping was used in the final design. The final prototype was made of three stations, the printing station, the inking station and the rotary system, which switches the stamps between printing and inking station. The other important design novelty is that the PDMS stamp has been fixed and the Au coated PET was actually applied to the stamp to get printed. The design minimizes the deformation on the stamp and also eases the linear propagation of the printing interface. The reel-to-reel design can be easily scaled up for mass production with large volume. The prototype was tested and the printing samples were made.