Nanofabrication is a core task performed and constantly further developed by todays and future semiconductor industry. The most challenging issues to overcome within this technology are minimizing process cost, increasing fabrication reliability and optimizing throughput. Printing techniques play a crucial role in efficient nanofabrication since they pave the way to large area patterning while keeping overall process time shorter and costs lower than any other traditional nanolithography technique. We concentrated on nanoimprint lithography (NIL) and nanotransfer printing (nTP) as scalable, purely mechanical, lithographic techniques to fabricate semiconductor devices suitable for innovative applications both in photovoltaics and electrochemical energy conversion. Therefor conventional protocols for nTP and NIL [1] were improved to transfer highly-ordered, repetitive Au and Pt nanostructures on various substrates, such as doped Si, SiO2 and glass. The device structures showed high quality and fidelity and positive feature sizes down to 50 nm over extensive substrate areas. Furthermore, they were characterized successfully by conductive-AFM and cyclic voltammetry which demonstrated both their electrical and electrochemical functionality. As an example, nTP and NIL were applied on Si substrates with Au to fabricate lines on which Pt catalyst particles were deposited electrochemically in order to investigate the hydrogen evolution/oxidation reaction (HER/HOR) [2]. In doing so we were able to control the particles’ size and distance on the nanometer scale independent from each other. This offers the advantage to study the interdependence of geometry and electrocatalytic activity of such nanostructured electrode surfaces systematically.     «

Nanofabrication is a core task performed and constantly further developed by todays and future semiconductor industry. The most challenging issues to overcome within this technology are minimizing process cost, increasing fabrication reliability and optimizing throughput. Printing techniques play a crucial role in efficient nanofabrication since they pave the way to large area patterning while keeping overall process time shorter and costs lower than any other traditional nanolithography tec...     »