Imprint solutions, costs, and returns of patterning LED's - art. no. 65172E

High resolution patterning of LED's has shown the potential to significantly increase the light output. There are 3 different imprint strategies being proposed to manufacture these devices. These imprint solutions and all the support equipment for cleaning, coating, and etching form an imprint cell. This paper will compare the imprint cell and process solutions. Imprint is probably the only patterning technology that can deliver sub 100 nm features at a low enough cost to be of interest to the LED manufacturers. Patterning fine features on LED wafers must be able to deal with rough, non flat wafers. The competing imprint solutions rely on either; 1) flexing the wafer or 2) flexing the template 3) or making the surface of the template compliant, The published data on wafer non-flatness, and the compliance of the different solutions will be compared. Process solutions are still needed to eliminate residual non-conformality. The overall margin of the different process solutions will be compared, multilayer processes can tolerate 2.5 x larger residual layer variation than single layer imprint.