Prof. Xiang Zhang's Laboratory

at UC Berkeley

Site Updated:
10/24/2009

Flying-head Lithography

Patterning by scanning in an extreme fashion, plasmonic nanolithography is a maskless approach utilizing a flying head carrying an optical stylus to write onto the recording surface at nanometer scales. It has the potential to reach a resolution below 10 nm and orders higher throughput than other maskless lithography methods. This technique provides a new approach towards next generation of optical lithography and will also have a major impact on other high-tech applications such as optical and magnetic data storage. Utilizing this plasmonic nanolithography, we will be able to make current micro-processors more than ten times smaller but way more powerful, and store orders more data on both optical disks and hard disk drives.

The two key components in this work are the plasmonic lens and the flying plasmonic head. Plasmonic lens is micrometer scale structure that utilizes the collective oscillation of electrons at the metal dielectric interface, so called surface plasmons (SPP), to focus the energy of incident light into the nano-scale. The nanometers size optical stylus created by plasmonic lens is powerful enough to enable pattern writing in outstanding speed of tens of miles per hour.

 

The flying plasmonic head is made by micro-fabrication techniques and can carry thousands of plasmonic lenses on one head, and with the ability to scan at a speed of tens of miles per hour, gliding only 20 nm above the medium surface. This is equivalent to an aircraft flying with the gap only 2 mm from the ground. While may sound mysterious, this is in fact, self-stabilized process achieved only by carefully aerodynamic design of the flying head without any need of electronic parts. Similar air bearing techniques are also employed in the hard-disk drives for magnetic data storage.

This research work is available from Nature Nanotechnology under the name “Flying plasmonic lens in the near field for high-speed nanolithography” (October 12, 2008). For more information, here is another link ( http://xlab.me.berkeley.edu/publications/pdfs/93.NatureNanoTech2008_Yut.pdf ) to the full article

News link: "Berkeley researchers from NSF SINAM find way to make smaller chips" ABC 7 (June 2009)

 

 

 
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