KAIST

A KAIST research team led by Prof. Sang-Ouk Kim of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering has discovered a new nanowire manufacturing method,  university sources said on Monday (May 11).

The KAIST researchers successfully demonstrated soft graphoepitaxy of block copolymer assembly as a facile, scalable nanolithography for highly ordered sub-30-nm scale features. Graphoepitaxy is a new technique that uses artificial surface relief structure to induce crystallographic orientation in thin films.

Various morphologies of hierarchical block copolymer assembly were achieved by means of disposable topographic confinement of photoresist pattern. Unlike usual graphoepitaxy, soft graphoepitaxy generates the functional nanostrutures of metal and semiconductor nanowire arrays without any trace of structure-directing topographic pattern.

The discovery was featured in the May 7 edition of Nano-Letters. Application has been made for the domestic patent of the new method. 

The new method is expected to be advantageous for multi-layer overlay processing required for complex device architecture, the sources said.