Gas-Assisted UV-Based Complete Reversal Imprinting Process for Large-Area Replication of Microstructures
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Huang, Po-Hsun
Abstract
This study is devoted to developing a process for effective fabrication of large-area microstructures at room temperature and with low imprinting pressure. This process integrates the ultraviolet-curing (UV-curing) imprinting process, the gas-assisted imprinting process, and the reversal imprinting process to fabricate the microstructures onto the large area substrate. The UV-curing imprinting enables the process to perform without heating and cooling and under low pressure, while the gas-assisted embossing provides the uniform pressing pressure over the whole large area. By using gas-assisted and UV-curing mechanisms, the high temperature and high pressure can be avoided. With the reversal imprinting mechanism, the UV resin is coated onto the stmaper with microstructures cavity rather than the substrate, and is completely filled into the cavity then imprinting. In addition, in this study the reversal imprinting is incorporated with a gap-retained substrate holder to overcome the problem of air bubble defects.he experimental results show that the microstructures can be successfully fabricated onto the whole large area (230 mm ? 203 mm) substrate with high replication uniformity and negligible residual stress by using the proposed process. The imprinting results also show the negligible air bubble defects, demonstrating the effectiveness of air bubble removing using reversal imprinting technique and gap-retained substrate holder. In addition, the modified reversal imprinting mechanism can effectively enhance the height transcription of microstructures without the control of imprinting processing parameters. In summary, this study has successfully developed a large area gas-assisted UV-curing reversal imprinting process for the large area fabrication of microstructures, which shows the potential of being applied to the large-area optical elements such as ultra-thin light guide plates, diffusers, large array of microlens, etc.
Subjects
UV imprinting
reversal imprinting
gas-assisted imprinting
Type
thesis
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