Flexure-based Roll-to-roll Platform: A Practical Solution for Realizing Large-area Microcontact Printing

TLDR

Roll‑to‑roll microcontact printing enables large‑area nanoscale patterning with high throughput, avoiding the thermal step of nanoimprint lithography while providing multi‑axis precision and misalignment correction for diverse materials. The study aims to exploit a flexure‑based mechanism to achieve continuous microcontact printing with 500 nm precision and 0.05 N force control. The platform combines a fully automated roll‑to‑roll system with a novel backfilling chemistry optimized for high‑speed gold and silver patterning. The platform fabricated 300–600 nm gratings on 4‑inch plastic at 60 cm/min, demonstrating wafer‑scale, nanometer‑resolution reproducibility and applicability to other material systems.

Abstract

Abstract A continuous roll-to-roll microcontact printing (MCP) platform promises large-area nanoscale patterning with significantly improved throughput and a great variety of applications, e.g. precision patterning of metals, bio-molecules, colloidal nanocrystals, etc. Compared with nanoimprint lithography, MCP does not require a thermal imprinting step (which limits the speed and material choices), but instead, extreme precision with multi-axis positioning and misalignment correction capabilities for large area adaptation. In this work, we exploit a flexure-based mechanism that enables continuous MCP with 500 nm precision and 0.05 N force control. The fully automated roll-to-roll platform is coupled with a new backfilling MCP chemistry optimized for high-speed patterning of gold and silver. Gratings of 300, 400, 600 nm line-width at various locations on a 4-inch plastic substrate are fabricated at a speed of 60 cm/min. Our work represents the first example of roll-to-roll MCP with high reproducibility, wafer scale production capability at nanometer resolution. The precision roll-to-roll platform can be readily applied to other material systems.