Article

Large-Scale Roll-to-Roll Fabrication of Vertically Oriented Block Copolymer Thin Films

Department of Polymer Engineering, The University of Akron, Akron, Ohio 44325, United States
Center for Functional Nanomaterials, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973, United States
§ Department of Chemistry, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, Arkansas 72204, United States
ACS Nano, 2013, 7 (6), pp 5291–5299
DOI: 10.1021/nn401094s
Publication Date (Web): May 6, 2013
Copyright © 2013 American Chemical Society
*Address correspondence to alamgir@uakron.edu.

Abstract

Abstract Image

Large-scale roll-to-roll (R2R) fabrication of vertically oriented nanostructures via directed self-assembly of cylindrical block copolymer (c-BCP) thin films is reported. Nearly 100% vertical orientation of cylinders in sub-100 nm c-BCP films under optimized processing via a dynamic sharp temperature gradient field termed Cold Zone Annealing-Sharp or ‘CZA-S’ is achieved, with successful scale-up on a prototype custom-built 70 ft × 1 ft R2R platform moving at 25 μm/s, with 9 consecutive CZA units. Static thermal annealing of identical films in a conventional vacuum oven fails to produce comparable results. As a potential for applications, we fabricate high-density silicon oxide nanodot arrays from the CZA-S annealed BCP thin film template.

AFM images of the PS-PMMA thin films that CZA-S annealed and thermally annealed in a vacuum oven for different time periods, the image analysis method to analyze the %vertical cylinder population, GISAXS measurement of R2R CZA-S annealed and oven annealed PS-PMMA thin films, imperfect pattern transfer of silicon oxide nanodot arrays and AFM images of CZA-S annealed PS-P2VP thin film. This material is available free of charge via the Internet at http://pubs.acs.org.

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Article Views: 1,916 Times
Received 4 March 2013
Date accepted 6 May 2013
Published online 6 May 2013
Published in print 25 June 2013
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