The ever growing requirements for density of magnetic media has drive disc drive manufacturers far ahead of the lithographic minimum dimension “node” requirements of IC manufacturers. The traditional Deep-UV Stepping Exposure based tool sets are simply not suited to the feature sizes (30nm) which will be required for the print densities required. Nanoimprint Lithography (NIL) has emerged as a serious lithographic candidate.

NIL development has focused on issues such as stamp mastering and replication, exposure time, contamination control and system throughput, raising NIL’s suitability as a manufacturing technology. In this paper we review progress on manufacturing level solutions for the industry.