Princeton University researchers have shown that photocurable nanoimprint lithography (P-NIL) can produce lines of polymer resist just 7 nm wide with a pitch (or pattern repeat) of only 14 nm. The technique also produced reliable results over the whole area of a 4 inch wafer.

“This work really pushes the limit down to a few molecules in size,” said Stephen Chou of Princeton.

This is a 20-fold reduction compared with the state-of-the-art techniques used in making today’s most advanced computer chips and would result in 400 times more memory in a two-dimensional memory chip.

To date, the standard method for making the moulds used in nanoimprint lithography has been electron-beam lithography. This has created patterns of 10 nm dots with a 40 nm pitch but struggles to create patterning with a pitch smaller than 35 nm.

The team also used nanoimprint lithography to make gold contacts with a contact gap of just 5 nm.